Ad company is teaming up with US carriers to take over your lock screen | Hacker News Reader

Ad company is teaming up with US carriers to take over your lock screen

androidpolice.com

48 pointsCharlesW35 comments

I hated when Microshaft started taking over my lockscreen in w10, showing me photos of nice places every day while I'm stuck either in a office or working from home. It makes me feel miserable. Fortunately It's still possible to change the settings.

I also found this feature depressing, but for a different reason: it took away my autonomy. It was as if I'd come home to my living room only to find that someone had changed all the art on my walls to something else.

You both realize that you can change that setting, right? Settings -> Personalization -> Lock screen. It has always been there.

If I had to guess a percentage: 95% of people never explore settings.

(Annecdata: When Windows started combining labels in the taskbar, everytime I asked someone if they liked that, or they prefered seperate labels, they said seperate labels, and then I asked them if I could quickly change it back for them, and they always let me. It was an easy-to-find setting, but no one ever bothered.)

Normally I'd agree that the average user is bad at computers, but the comment I replied to specifically said they wanted to change the image, ergo, they were intended on customizing, but somehow thought they weren't allowed to.

Yes, I have been using a computer for quite some time now. I still think it's a bad feature!

Basically turning the lock screen into a non-specific travel ad. Kickbacks from airlines?

All these abuses have a single cause - users not in control of their computers. It's no coincidence that vim's start screen isn't being monetized this way.

Absolutely 100% this, it's fucking heinous. I have no idea how to effectively fight it, but it's so rough watching the tech industry abuse people more and more every year.

Use and strengthen the free and user-respecting software ecosystem.

Replace the stock OS on your phone with LineageOS (or similar). Don't use apps requiring Play Services. Get stuff from F-Droid.

>users not in control of their computers. It's no coincidence that vim's start screen isn't being monetized this way.

Is it? Every time I run npm install my terminal gets plastered with ads from the likes of "open collective".

I think the joke here is that starting vim with an empty buffer used to display a message about donating to some charity organization.

I'm going to disable this nonsense the second it hits my device, if ever.

It will probably as easy to do as uninstalling the Google Play Services (not that hard, but hard enough so that most people won't do it).

Android without Google Play Services is not very useful.

I've been using it for the last 3 weeks and it has been fine. I don't even have microG installed.

The only thing I really miss is Google Maps...

GMaps WV on f-droid is a self contained wrapper for Google maps. It works great!

Yeah... OSM just doesn't cut it unless if you're in a city.

Huh?!

GrapheneOS.org users disagree.

The cool thing about GrapheneOS in this regard is that it allows you to use Play Services if you want to, but you can limit it to a single profile and don't have to give it the special privileges it usually wants ("Play Services Sandboxing").

God. If this happens to my iPhone, I’m dumping it and going back to a mobile dumb phone.

Apple would never let this happen, thankfully.

They let free and paid apps constantly ask for App Store reviews...

I wouldn't be so sure.

Fortunately, there's a setting to disable it right in your iPhone settings.

I'd never carry something that let Pegasus into my life so easily.

Max of 3 times a year per app is hardly constantly.

Somehow I've counted it happening five times in the 20 times I've held an iPhone.

Luck happens, I guess.

If this comes to the US I'll finally make the switch to iPhone. I don't care if it's optional.

Thanks for Lineage OS... Pure Linux would be even better though (I.E., some version of Linux where they don't block you from running Linux software).

In an ideal world yes, but PinePhone leaves much to be desired at this stage.

This is old news. A lot of these Android lock screen ad companies came and went in the early 2010s. I'm sure we'll see a few copycats pop up and die this decade as well.

Looks like Apple will be forced to put this on iOS under the EU’s new competition rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31988367

According to which clause? (Pretty hard to believe.)

The primary countermove seems to expand the community of open (user controlled) Android implementations for existing hardware.

I am pretty sure my next pocket device will be such.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com