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Comment by Doctor_Fegg | Hacker News Reader

Here's a way in which they can save 100% of the size: Stop stubbornly barring mobile clients from using the web interface. This is why I don't use Facebook Messenger at all.

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But then they don't have permissions to slurp up all of your contacts, watch all of your SMS, and listen to your microphone...

I really wish iOS would allow you to select which contacts/photo album to give an app access to, instead of all hundreds/thousands of them.

Maybe group-based, and some apps only get the selected.

I wish Android/iOS would let the user decide individually on every single file/contact/etc access, at least in an optional setting.

Would be interesting to see how many seemingly harmless apps start to break, I would expect similar results to surfing the web with a JS blocker.

For photos, I wish iOS would not require a permission at all in the case where I just want it to open an OS-controlled file picker and then give the app the one photo, akin to copy-pasting it. No reason to give access to every photo when only N are picked.

It’s been a while since I worked with the photo library APIs in iOS, but as I recall there in fact is an API that apps can use to request the user to pick individual photos from an OS picker without further permissions. Most apps just don’t use it because they all want to do their own custom photo picker UIs (even privacy focused apps fall victim to this).

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiimagepicke...

iOS 2.0+

Wait! Somebody found evidence of them listening to your microphone?

Well I have messenger lite on Android and they, as the parent says, "ask permission to listen to your microphone". Presumably they do voice chat, which needs that permission, surely.

Still no. If an iOS app is using your microphone while backgrounded, your phone's taskbar at the top of the screen will be red. iOS does not allow apps to use the microphone while the screen is off. The microphone thing is a myth fueled by paranoia and confirmation bias. FB already has plenty of data on you and doesn't need to run NLP on everything you say in order to show you relevant ads.

> iOS does not allow apps to use the microphone while the screen is off.

Isn't the screen off in nearly all of the legitimate uses of a microphone, ie. "I'm replicating the ux of a phone call in my chat app"?

The apps don't have permission to do that either unless you grant them.

For some reason I can access the chat using Firefox Mobile on iOS but not through Safari.

I used mbasic.facebook.com for a while when it was not possible to use it from the regular mobile web. But for like a year or something they appear to have turned the web back on (at least for firefox, haven't tested anything else).

mbasic.facebook.com

If I request the desktop site, I am able to access Messenger (iOS, Safari)

Yeah, I do that in firefox mobile as well.

That’s a workaround for a on purpose decision to cripple the mobile website, where the chat and messages worked flawlessly. Another decision against users was to use messages as notification in some cases.

I didn’t pull the trigger on canceling the account as from time to time I find news and event from pages that I follow, but there’s no way I’m installing an app that uses so many shady tactics.

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