I dunno they’re free to define their “sharing groups” how they want. Try not to think of it as them defining “family” which they can’t do.
I’m not saying it’s perfect but it’s better than nothing. I have a tablet for my bird and well I’m not comfortable leaving something around with my user account signed in all day unlocked but I wanted the bird to be able to watch the cartoons I paid for. Same goes for my Tv’s remote. Now guests can use my TV’s remote and they don’t immediately have access to my email nor can they order movies on my account. Of course if google finds out the account belongs to an animal they’ll probably throw a conniption fit.
In practice that seems to be largely how it’s defined (AFAICT) though maybe once people start crossing imaginary geographic borders alarms are set off?
What we have here is a pretty laughable and egregious example of a programmer falsehood that is made possible by the tech sector’s lack of diversity. If you enjoyed this, consider checking out these other awesome falsehoods: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
It sounds like they’re conflating “family” with “household.” A “household” may also be tricky to define, but at least it carries less emotional baggage than “family.”
Family managers need to live in the same country as their families
I’ll bet this has as much to do with “edge case” as “pain in the ass with licenses” as many forms of media are licensed differently in different countries. What is the business logic for “movie clear for family share in USA, but not in Afghanistan” when the family is split between those countries (and obviously you would actually need to deal with as many countries as people allowed in a maximum sized family). Just as bad, how do you do the payments? Do you cut the US check for 80% of the total, and a 20% check for the Afghanistan license holder? 100% to whatever license holder the original purchase was done in, and nothing for the other? What if the purchase and share are significantly separated in time?
This is at the crux of these kinds of things. As a software developer myself, I can also say this stuff usually isn’t “the programmers”, most often these kinds of rules come from the client. They often want certain information from a customer, or indeed want to prevent customers from abusing their system, or even just want to force data to fit into the models of other systems.
Simplest example of how this gets weird is names. What is a name? It is just a set of characters, right? So, as a programmer, you make a single field that just checks if there is something filled in. But then the client wants to put that data in a system that sends out mailings that start with something like “Dear mr. so-and-so” or “Dear mrs. lastname”. So they say “we need to know what their firstname is and what their lastname is and how to address them”. Ok, you add a field “lastname” and a field “title”. The client looks at that and says “our CRM system can only deal with Mr. Mrs. and Ms.”. You growl a little and change your “title” field to a dropdown with just these options. After a while the client comes back to you “someone entered as a name ‘Ms. Twilight Sparkle’ and we’re pretty sure it’s a dude. Apparently he’s using his stagename. Please check if entered names are real and the entered title matches their gender”. At this point programmers will most likely start to complain and (rightly) call bullshit, but more often than not the sales dept. will want to keep this client and tell the programmer to just build it anyway.
You haven’t worked with many good ones than. A good software engineer is someone who can quickly understand interactions that are outside of their own domain. I would rephrase lamaranagram’s post as : “Bad things happen when bad programmers decide things. When good programmers decide things, the client overrules them.”
Amazon lets me put the books in my account on to five devices. I would prefer a situation where I could copy the books anywhere but their approach seems reasonable to me. My wife and my son both use my kindle account. Its a bit too personal for me to grant the same privileges to friends though.
I am a white Australian programmer but only today we were joking about how the Malaysians are taking the place over from the Indians and Pakistanis. All three of those nationalities include significant ethnic and religious diversity.
But part of the reason is my employer’s preference for cheaper, visa restricted workers.
Wow, thank you for putting a rant that has been a weird cloud in my head into organized paragraphs, that was satisfying. I’m a web dev at an early childhood nonprofit in NYC. Diverse city, working with highly intelligent, sensitive people, who give and design trainings regularly in cultural competency. When I mentioned during a design meeting for a new web app that really we should just be gathering “name” in a single field to allow flexibility - given that firstname lastname really doesn’t describe our diverse set of clients - everyone’s faces turned white, until I hurriedly said “but, of course I won’t, I’m just saying…”
Short answer: pre-existing licensing and distribution agreements. This was the actual root of region coding getting locked into the DRM of DVD. It really isn’t some deep evil tech conspiracy it’s just that all the content companies long ago set up deals for cross licensing and there really isn’t a good reason to undo this from their perspective.
