Hacker News Reader

Comment by distances | Hacker News Reader

I usually simply uninstall the app on the first clearly spammy notification. Why wouldn't I? It immediately sours the app image.

If it's borderline I will first try silencing the channel like the parent commenter.

View on HN

Those rules only work until you're required to have such app installed to do, for example, credit card payments.

Where i live, GDPR and related laws make it illegal to mix advertising permissions with functional permissions. So that's never going to happen.

I've spent plenty of time working on GDPR compliance in EU and I can directly tell you there's nothing in GDPR that would say anything like that.

GDPR talks about data collection and says nothing about having your own business spam you with advertisement (as long as they don't collect data outside their GDPR restrictions).

> Consent is presumed not to be freely given if it does not allow separate consent to be given to different personal data processing operations despite it being appropriate in the individual case [...]

https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-43/

That has absolutely nothing to do with notifications and pop ups.

You’re right, but only if the company wouldn’t track whether you’ve seen or even received that message. So yes, general or even contextual messages would be allowed, but “You haven’t seen X in 9 days” would imply processing personal data for marketing purposes.

With iOS, they send the message to Apple’s servers, Apple sends the message to the user’s device and the device decides whether to display the pop up based on the user’s settings. Neither the third party app nor Apple knows whether the message has been seen unless the user clicks on the message that causes it to open the app.

I don’t see what this says about notifications

Which can be solved by finding a competitor with less abusive practices.

Not in a monopoly or oligopoly, which is the common case in markets with high barriers to entry.

If this a hypothetical? I can't think of any monopolies that I need to do business with that only do business through an app.

My bank's android app has more control over my account than any other way of interacting with them, including going into branches and posting forms. That's not strictly a monopoly but I'm on my fifth bank and they've all been similarly rubbish.

As a UK customer, I use Monzo bank and have pretty consistently had good experiences. They are a new bank. Recieving international money transfers was the only bit that they didn't support.

Huh, interesting. I can't think of many notifications I would want from my bank. I've got an alarm for if my balance goes under a certain threshold, which I guess could be handled via a notification, but IMO it is easier to just make the threshold high enough that I can treat it as a "check-once-per-day" thing, and get the notifications via email.

> Which can be solved by finding a competitor with less abusive practices

For those with infinite time or for whom this is a single issue, yes. For the rest of us, disabling notifications isn’t too hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com