“Stylish” is back, and you still shouldn't use it
robertheaton.com
robertheaton.com
It's come to the point that it seems reasonable to assume that anything you install will pull every iota of data available to it.
I think this grew out of a good place, at least I hope, where early pioneers assumed good intentions and generally most software was designed with "open" as a core philosophy. However it's very clear that we're very far removed from that, it boggles my mind that if an expense app on my phone needs to take a picture of a receipt my only option is to allow it not only permanent use of my camera but also access to all of my photos and videos. Why is the default not to launch a sandboxed camera app that only exists to take the receipt photo, and then disappears taking with it any permissions the app needed to carry this out?
THIS! Seriously, it angers me so greatly that I have to deal with such stupidity as all or nothing permissions. If I want to allow a single photo, but not all photos, no such luck. If I want to allow access to save photos, but not read photos, tough. Etc etc
If Apple really cared about privacy instead of using it as a marketing ploy, this would be mandated already.
As an aside, access to the Camera and access to Photos is already separate on iOS, you have to approve both separately (which becomes apparent if you use Instagram, for example).
Sometimes when I want to save an image, instead of allowing access to Photos, I copy the image into the clipboard.
Say you, as an app developer, want to improve the camera experience (say to recognize QR codes. it's a sane, useful thing to do). You need camera permission to do this, so you add it to your permissions list (users can still deny it).
Great. So say you want to allow people to reject it, and instead use their own camera app that they trust. Easy, you can do that with an open-camera intent, which doesn't require any permissions. You just get the image they took.
The problem is this: if you had your "let me control the camera and all photos" access rejected, Android also rejects your "open any camera" request. So now you're entirely unable to access cameras, and at best you can let users share an image to your app (which is extremely problematic and usually still requires file permissions in practice, since nobody builds file providers correctly (and legacy apps don't at all)).
Meanwhile, if you never requested camera access in the first place, "open any camera" will always work. But then you're unable to streamline anything.
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tl;dr API permissions very nearly everywhere in consumer products are 100% shit, and something like 99% hostile to the very concept they're trying to support. It's ridiculous and in no way necessary and I don't know why companies keep doing it, except perhaps fear of alienating their ad revenue sources.
I did that on an Android app I had to build for a client. It was quite a nightmare to make it works on different phone because many manufacturer added their own camera apps. Some were giving a full size image, other were giving a tiny thumbnail, but you were able to get the full size from the file system, but some didn't returned anything at all, so to actually get the picture, I had to scan the gallery pictures beforehand, scan it afterward, and take the new one. It was a long time ago though, near 2011, Honeycomb was just released, so maybe it's different now but I seriously doubt it.
These days I have everything trimmed down to the bare minimum open source programs only. My "old" phone runs faster than everyones current year phone and I have no adverts on anything. I use next to no social media and I feel I live a better life and get better experiences with tech than the general public.
Most modern tech is actively hostile to the user and having some restraint and avoiding the crap will reward you well.
Mobile OS and phone makers are incentivize not to do this because of various vested interests.
Using the 'follow the money' idea, if the app maker can get income from selling it they are LESS likely to try to make money by mugging you for data. It's not 100% but it helps.
> I’m surprised that SimilarWeb finds the personal browsing data that it siphons off via Stylish so valuable. The data almost certainly feeds into SimilarWeb’s main product, the SimilarWeb platform, a tool that provides reports on the aggregate usage statistics of websites and apps... But data collected via Stylish will surely be riddled with so much sampling bias that it becomes worthless... A giant stew of miscellaneous, unattributed scraps of data can’t ever turn into a representative sample, no matter how much salt and machine learning you add.
I'm not surprised at all. It's important to note that SimilarWeb sells its data to non-statisticians.
Imagine this scenario: Marketing analyst has a gut feeling that the product would be popular with millennials on Reddit, but old-school marketing execs barely know what Reddit is. Analyst sneaks a SimilarWeb subscription into the budget. Analyst gets Stylish-based data that is heavily biased towards Reddit. Analyst may know this. Analyst doesn't care. Analyst uses the data to "prove" that the company's users are on Reddit and justify the Reddit ad spend they wanted anyways. Campaign is a success. Pretty much everyone wins (kind of): Reddit users get more relevant ads. Analyst advances their career and reputation. SimilarWeb gets paid. Stylish extension can be maintained and polished. SimilarWeb maybe even affords to hire for their security team, who makes sure that the data is anonymized at rest.
At the end of the day, adtech is a beast that grows because it tells people what they want to hear, and remains silent when it can't find that answer. p-hacking and survivorship bias are the way of the world. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. But... if this sounds like a bubble to you, all I can say is that you should diversify your holdings outside of tech stocks.
Thanks to the author and submitter. I had no idea, been using Stylish for years. Very disappointing, but I'm glad there's an easy alternative.
Open source is libre software.
That, combined with "Dark Background + Light Text" with custom colors makes Firefox a beautiful sight in my personal night mode.
"Dark Background" for the majority of sites that don't have good dark Stylus themes, disabled on the ones that do.
This one is nice:
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/318912/how-to-override-the-c...