I Ducking Hate This!

I love technology. There is one thing about it though that truly gets under my skin: its annoying tendency to patronise me.

Need examples? I've got a few.

Lane assist. German cars will not let me permanently turn off lane assist. Every single time I start the engine it is back, helpfully tugging at the wheel. The irony is that this system regularly misreads lane markings in construction zones, which has produced more nerve-wracking moments than any other feature in that car. The manufacturer's rationale for switching it back on at every ignition? Safety. So I can do 150 km/h down a German autobahn, but deliberately crossing a painted line is where the danger begins?

Android's ear protection. Play something at full volume for a while and the phone quietly walks the level back down to barely audible. No prompt, no switch, no setting buried three menus deep. It just corrects me. That gets genuinely annoying in every scenario where the phone is only the source and the real volume lives somewhere else - a speaker, an amp, the car stereo I already set. The phone can't know that. All it knows is that the slider has been at the top for a while. And besides, if I want to blast my eardrums away, shouldn't that be my problem alone? I'd have no issue with this as a feature I could turn off. A permanent and mandatory correction feels like overreach.

Swipe keyboards. This is the latest grievance and the actual reason this post exists. I'm a swipe keyboard enthusiast, it is fast, efficient, and usually reads my mind. But I do occasionally drop an f-bomb in a casual chat. I rarely swear, but when life throws a curveball a "wtf" is simply the correct response. Try swiping that and you get the famous "what the duck". When I went looking for the reason, I learned that swear words are only half of it. The filter also covers what they call "highly sensitive words". And who gets to decide what counts as sensitive? Our flagship phones come from American companies, so the US cultural standard sets the threshold, and some of those standards are startlingly conservative. Case in point: the word "abortion" is apparently too delicate to swipe. Seriously?

I do get the reasoning. Car manufacturers don't want to be sued for shipping anything less than the highest safety setting. E-scooter operators are dodging liability. Apple and Google would rather not have certain words turning up in autosuggestions. All fair. But how about adjustable sensitivity settings, and then actually respecting whatever the user picked? Or let the word be typed and swiped and simply keep it out of the suggestions? Either of those beats building nanny systems that appoint themselves language and decency police.

Since I first wrote this, the lane assist part stopped being one manufacturer being careful. The EU's general safety regulation made a whole family of these assistants mandatory on new cars, including speed assistance that you are allowed to switch off but that switches itself back on the next time you turn the key. My specific complaint is now law. I'm not arguing against the safety case here, some of these systems demonstrably save lives. I'm arguing about the reset.

The more of daily life runs through these interfaces, the more it matters that they let me say what I mean and keep the decisions I already made. I'd call that a right. It is also a decent part of why I ended up rebuilding my setup out of smaller single-purpose gadgets, because the fewer devices I own that hold opinions about me, the better.

Bonus example: I tried to generate a picture for this article and used the word "prude" in the prompt. The image generator slapped my wrist, because apparently that violates the content policy. It was not a very good prompt anyway.