The key phrases here are "recording every tap and swipe" and "on their iPhone apps". I'm not saying it is okay, but the sensationalist headline takes away from the real issue.
In smaller publications, some shoddy reporting can often be attributed to a lack of experience or resources. It's hard to find an excuse for larger publications with well-established editorial resources, however. These stories are presented under the guise of public interest, but in reality they seem increasingly driven by politics and sinister ulterior motives. The end result is the spread of misinformation and further public distrust of the media and technology as a whole.
Pick a popular company / product / service, find something that they could be doing, throw up an article suggesting that's what they could be doing but have the title inferring that it is what they are actually doing. Rinse / repeat.
This is what happens under capitalism when private news organizations are disrupted by the Internet.
The solution is a collaborative news site, we don’t need intrepid reporters going into war zones when everyone can record video on their phone. We don’t need biased clickbait news providing fodder for soial network algorithms to herd us into echo chambers. We need a place where people of all viewpoints meet and duke it out like Wikipedia but for news.
PS: wikinews in particular sucks though
I imagine readers on HN actually read articles at a vastly higher rate than e.g. Reddit or Facebook, yet on reading the comments it often becomes quickly apparent that many users, even here, do not bother reading articles before commenting on them. In an ideal world I wouldn't mind seeing misleading headlines put in the same bucket as false or misleading advertising. Of course in practice that'd be a terrible idea since this rule would simply be used for the powers that be to litigate against anything they don't like being published.
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/facebooks-messaging-par...
I don't want this to devolve into an argument of semantics, but given NYT's editorial resources there's no doubt they carefully scrutinized how the "read" and "write" would be interpreted by their readership in the context of a negative report about Facebook.
https://support.spotify.com/is/using_spotify/playlists/group...
I saw the title and thought "so the app is recording what's on the screen... which on a phone, is going to be itself... that's not such a big deal." As much as I don't like this sort of telemetry, it is in no way the sort of security issue the title appears to be insinuating.
I assume you are against their choice to send a log of their drawing commands in the form of images.
“This gives Air Canada employees — and anyone else capable of accessing the screenshot database — to see unencrypted credit card and password information,” he told TechCrunch.
The takeaway is that some companies are capturing things that they shouldn't be storing, and the article has exposed atleast one instance where this information has been sent to a third party without masking.
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As a side note, I've always been afraid to use payment options within apps that redirect to bank logins or payment gateways and this only feeds my fears.
Even if you're making the payment through a trusted bank or a payment provider, these apps still probably intercept and store the information you gave your bank.
This is so that should there be a dispute they have a screen shot of the forms presented and what details the customer provided. Payment screens would not be captured this way.
Also, as I recall, banks legitimately "track" user interactions as a means of fraud detection.
Effectively an invisible captcha.
And some porn sites also ask for camera access.
I think you are measuring video engagement/scoring from your reactions to video using your facial expressions.
It's a very good approach for bypassing fake views.