How mobile apps illegally share personal data
noyb.eu
noyb.eu
Worst part was while I decided against using it, it still took a while before I found a replacement.
Seriously: Monthly payments, and not only $1 for an alarm app, and then they have the gall to try to get away with tracking me on top of it..!
But sometimes I feel myself slipping closer and closer to your much more cynical ideas.
In particular I remember donating what for me was a good chunk of money to Caddy right before they started "experimenting with business models" or whatever he called it. Same goes for happily paying WhatsApp, walking around like a living talking billboard for it only to have them sell out to Facebook shortly after.
Just two examples from the top of my mind.
History has taught us that an enforced rule of law is the only way to prevent scammers from being the dominate players (by number, not size) in a market.
Law makes cheating less adaptive. But even without law, cheats would not exceed some small minority.
They added ChatGPT and all sorts of other shit to it unfortunately but the core functionality is still good
You can't even buy your way out of it like people suggest. The fact that you want to do that signals you have money and makes your data even more valuable. Even companies that do not do this currently, assuming they are publicly traded, with eventual succumb. They just need a bad quarter or a few people needing to boost their metrics and they'll add the new revenue source.
People try to justify everything they do and this is one the worst of them. Some even seemed to use this as an argument against open source which is usually free.
Along the same lines there is "What is your monetization plan?".
The next one I wish would go away is the "but they have a privacy policy" line of thinking. Like that means anything.
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/Android_privacy_report.pd...
> that personal data is being harvested by default en masse
You seem to be agreeing, at least to the point that a built-in app is usually granted permissions without requesting from the user. I think it would be more correct to say "bad implementation" instead of "bad design" but the point seems to make sense.
But ultimately it seems that you and OP both agree that this "bad implementation" (ask the user for permission instead of being granted by the OS) is the intended design (require unrelated permission for basic functionality).
No, I don't want Google or whoever else to have their alarm app scanning my contacts for no good reason¹ either, and perhaps I can't stop it whoever is doing it, but given how many apps are locked onto that phone, how often it finds a reason to start one of them up, what perms they want, etc., I'm pretty sure I trust Xiaomi less. They probably have all my current data already anyway (I'm sure this phone is using more data than the previous one, though I've not dug into why yet, perhaps sending my info home is why), but hey ho…
My last phone was from Xiaomi too, but that was relatively stock Android (on the Android One program) so didn't have so much extra junk forced into it.
--
[1] they might have reason, I doubt I'd consider it good!
Unfortunately not surprising at all for Xiaomi, or any Chinese smartphone maker for that matter. Not that Korean or American Android phone makers like Samsung, Motorola, Google Pixel etc are privacy friendly, but Chinese smartphones are way worse.
>Permitted uses involve apps that must discover any and all installed apps on the device, for awareness or interoperability purposes may have eligibility for the permission. Permitted uses include device search, antivirus apps, file managers, and browsers.
Progressive Web Apps on the other hard are actively restricted by the browser sandbox and are ganerally a preferred solution from a privacy perspective.
What if I use something like AdGuard to block reqs ?
The moment your favorite app starts using only `your-fav-app.com` domain for everything, ads and sending out your private info included, you are toast and you'll need a MITM proxy or any other on-device-network-payload-inspector-after-decryption-has-taken-place to save yourself. (So maybe Adguard's client app, I presume? But haven't ever tried.)
Maybe Privaxy[0] will help -- haven't tried it yet and I got no time and energy for it for the moment, sadly, but DNS-level blocking in particular is just waiting for a few more resourceful vendors to do the right thing for their interests, and we're disarmed.
Not just that, services could end up using the same IP across providers: https://blog.cloudflare.com/addressing-agility/
"all your data"? What data exactly? My contact list? My gallery?
https://www.xda-developers.com/android-permissions-bypass-pl...
As far as I know, most (if not all) of the concerns shared have been addressed in the following 2 years, so I would assume that this is not an issue anymore in 2023 - or at least not as severe. I believe that new loopholes exist, but this one seems outdated to me.
btw "The researchers discovered that the Shutterfly app was accessing the location tags of photos' EXIF metadata. All that's required is the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission" sounds ridiculous. If you grant permission to read entire files, of course the app can read metadata.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...
But even if you do, these are restricted from wholesale collection of data like your contacts by marketplace and public relations pressures and concerns that smaller junk app vendors don't have.
I cover this in depth more here: https://divestos.org/pages/browsers
(Disclosure: I have worked for Google in the past, but not for over 8 years, and I’m certainly not speaking for them here. My Google job never included anything relevant to this comment, except doing roughly 1-2 years of standard SRE/devops/sysadmin work for a now-decommissioned acquired product in the publisher-side display ads yield management space, ending roughly a decade ago.)
Your distancing yourself from your former employer's practices is appreciated but Google monopolizing click and all other web usage data isn't any better than keeping those for themselves from an antitrust PoV (as opposed to selling the data under FRAND terms).
There's no way around taking Chrome development and monopoly influence on web standardization away from Google as one outcome of ongoing antitrust lawsuits.
I’m comparing practices from the perspective of privacy, not antitrust, since that is the frame in which we were discussing, and with which the original submitted NOYB article was concerned.
I don’t like monopoly power in the advertising industry any more than you do, and Google is not an exception to that. But I don’t want the fix to any Google advertising monopoly to be forcing them to share user data on FRAND terms. Not only would that likely violate privacy law in Europe and elsewhere in the world, it would reduce my data’s privacy protections to what results from the worst privacy practices among anyone who buys the data from Google. Yes, that’s far worse than what Google currently does.
> There's no way around taking Chrome development and monopoly influence on web standardization away from Google as one outcome of ongoing antitrust lawsuits.
If authorities like those in Europe or the US decide that antitrust violations by Google warrant those remedies, I have no personal objection. But I would object to any anti-monopoly measures that effectively destroy the privacy of the profile Google has built on me, such as mandatory FRAND licensing of that data. At least I can delete the data when it’s just the one data custodian, and one which properly implements and tests data deletion process more than many companies.
Uhm, false? Unless by "all your data" refers to "what you do in the app" + IP address + phone model, on the iPhone nothing else is accessible by default. All that info is also available to any website you visit, so PWAs are not special in this regard.
PWAs don't have this problem.
I think the only sensitive APIs not available in the browser are calendar and photo gallery access, but PWAs have otherwise access to Contacts, GeoLocation, Cameras, Microphone, Clipboard, and even the FileSystem.
Maybe Android apps do suffer from the problem you’re describing, since permissions are granted lumped together at install time, but on iOS all permissions are optional just like in the browser.
A lot of apps are perfectly usable without file access by sharing a file to them from the file manager.
GrapheneOS also has “Contact Scopes,” so you can grant an app contacts access (so it thinks) but it’s actually a subset or blank list of contacts.
Another feature that’s commonly recommended is using multiple profiles. I often see people use this to run Google apps in an environment isolated from the rest of their data.
microG handles most of the routine access to Google services that I need.
This feature is also useful in LineageOS, as a kind of native firewall. Thankfully most open source apps on my device don't use network connectivity so the permission is greyed out to begin with.
My DivestOS features both the GrapheneOS and LineageOS implementation, and I document the former as block and the latter as "data restriction" (eg. to simply block over cellular) as it cannot guarantee a real block.
The creator used to post a lot about it here:
Turned out, all apps from this vendor talked to each other, in the background. If one app has filesystem access but no network access, and another has network but no filesystem access, the former can upload private filesystem data by sending it through the latter.
Further suspicion: Apps remain killed, for long periods of time, if I don't start any of them.
Quick test: Kill all apps. Start them one by one. Check if other apps are now running.
Confirmation: Pull APKs from device; RE their code for IPC.
You’ve given me something to think about. Luckily, I only have to amend my mental model a bit, to assume giving a permission to any vendor’s app is to give that permission to every app from that vendor. In most cases where that would be a problem, I already run such apps under a separate user profile, which fully prevents IPC.
I wouldn't hold my breath. Mainline hardware manufacturers have little incentive to support this.
e/OS is a well rounded, compromise alternative with much broader hardware support. I use it with an inexpensive Moto 5G Ace.
https://www.motorola.com/us/smartphones-motorola-one-5g-ace/...
I'm certainly not holding my breath on more GrapheneOS support, as so few people care. I'm not entirely sure it'd be the right fit for me anyway. I'm currently using a microg setup with lsposed so I can patch out some junk in modern apps (like Outlook trying to be device admin), and this kind of hooking is not something GrapheneOS is interested in (a feature request I opened a while back: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/284).
It is currently shipping Chromium Browser/System WebView from December of 2022 with 265 known security issues: https://divestos.org/misc/ch-dates.txt
Users cannot change the system webview, Android only allows pre-included ones as it gets directly loaded into the process space of all apps using the WebView widget.
And it still makes many connections to Google and includes proprietary Google binaries and downloads more at runtime: https://divestos.org/misc/e.txt
Disclosure: DivestOS is my project.
App with file permission can communicate with network permission app
According to the GrapheneOS FAQ: “As of Android 10, apps cannot obtain permission to access non-resettable hardware identifiers such as the serial number, MAC addresses, IMEIs/MEIDs, SIM card serial numbers and subscriber IDs.”
> phone number
I don’t think it has access to this.
> location
You can turn off location permissions. Spoofing location (so the app doesn’t know it has no permission) is a planned feature but with no ETA.
> sensor data
You can turn off sensor permissions alongside other app permissions. This is another toggle present in GrapheneOS but not stock Android.
[0] https://github.com/TrackerControl/tracker-control-android
Gotta love what noyb is doing. In case you want to support their work, there are links on their website to donate or to become a member. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but their approach to privacy law enforcement is precisely what we need right now. Companies that mis-use personal data (often in violation of European law) must know that there can be consequences (reputational, financial and potentially legal).
In addition to legislation the problem requires active programmes of public education and information as is the case for all other public health or security issues.
More lives are saved per dollar running a "Don't drink-drive" campaign than giving police money to arrest drunk drivers.
"Don't install that app" should be a tag-line every mother and child knows, like "See it. Say it. Sorted.", just to get people to pause and think... "would I share all my all my personal data and access to my life with a random total stranger?" Because that's what you're doing when you install some dodgy app at a restaurant.
Maybe groups like NOYB could do more work on sophisticated modern influential media to attack the root cause of the problem: a fundamentally flawed security model with a set of wholly inappropriate assumptions.
Change the assumptions.
Maybe we could enforce the (existing!) laws against malware, fraud, spam, etc so that people can continue to install apps & use them and be confident knowing that nothing bad will happen, and if it does happen then the offenders will be punished appropriately?
GDPR breaches aren't limited to apps btw, it happens on websites and even in real life (Tesco stores in the UK for example have a notice inside the store about data collection; presumably they're doing Bluetooth/Wi-Fi MAC address tracking - by the time you read the notice you're already being stalked, and there's no way to opt-out other than inconveniencing yourself by manually toggling the relevant radios before going to the store).
You're advocating an extreme measure (locking yourself at home) in response to a practically non-existent threat ("serial killers" do not roam the streets looking for random victims except in Hollywood plots). OTOH the chance of an average person being scammed by corporate data thieves seems less than one in ten, as a total guess. So surely you see you're making a disingenuous analogy.
Education is a very powerful weapon against the criminality of Surveillance Capitalism. And it's flexible; people can choose a range of responses, from pausing before installing a new app, to getting rid of their smartphone and choosing a better lifestyle.
In many cases, people are tracked by services they cannot really avoid. One example is the German "Deutsche Bahn" app, which is full of trackers. Some organizations are now trying to fight this using legal means. Another example was the Covid vaccine registration page in my canton in Switzerland, where Google Analytics was being used (right on the page with my sensitive medical information). It wasn't even being mentioned in the privacy policy.
We have laws that say what's legal and what's illegal. If something is illegal, those laws should be enforced. Especially when users have no choice.
People always have a choice. Blinded by comfort, convenience and other "first world problems" they may not immediately recognise it as a choice, but by historical standards they absolutely always have one.
Because a potential solution exists in which people can have the optimal solution with no drawbacks— why not have it.
It isn’t “convenience” and other “first world problems” to realise that you need to use certain software to function in society with few trade offs.
The privacy-invading nature of many pieces of software isn’t innate. It’s a choice, and it could easily be regulated.
People shouldn’t have to pay with their data.
Licensure tends to be a protective mechanism to keep salaries high. If that's your goal, great, but it's a weird hammer to apply to fix your subjective opinion of what's ethical.
Talking about wild speculation! Shall we have a look at all of the laws and the companies that break them that have only received slap on the wrist level fines? So clearly, there are some sort of regulations, otherwise, how would these fines be imposed? If there were no violations of those regulations, why are fines being imposed. So, your "nobody going to violate that" is already starting the conversation on shaky ground
Why do nobody question the fact that it is possible for an application to access data without user consent to begin with? Why are we transforming it into a human problem? The tech is to blame.
The problem is that we first design platforms/APIs to automate everything, and secondly try to make it secure/explicit. We need the opposite.
Very few companies/programmers I know write 'secure first'. Most of the time it's "this shit isn't working, turn off the security stuff and see if it works then we'll re-enable it later"
We need to stop automating everything and then complain that companies aren't putting optional banners everywhere. This is beyond stupid.
I am not saying that automation shouldn't be possible at all, but that platforms shouldn't be designed this way.
If users had to consent to contact access, socket connection, and every single packet sent (obviously they would need to become readable to layman) there would be way less demand for data privacy laws.
By "involving" I do not necessarily mean harder, the goal isn't to make computers less accessible, but if we give users the ability to control whatever go in and out their devices maybe that making them a bit more interactive so instead of clicking "yes" to allow keyboard access you could drag a keyboard icon to the app or any other device you want to use as input instead.
Consent doesn't need to be presented as yes/no, there are multiple ways to make users understand what is being accessed.
Now, making the base process manual doesn't mean that the user will need to do the same thing over and over. I am not against automation, but I believe that it should come from the user, not a fancy system that some external entity decided is the best way to handle permission.
By outsourcing the responsibility to your data, you are effectively giving up on understanding it.
Ideally, I believe that consumer computers should become interactive/programmable systems where the OS is responsible for exposing all the environment calls, and the apps all stateless functions. The process of mapping environment access to app is manual, but create consent AND customizability. Plus additional benefits like easing the development of cross-platform applications and maintainability.
The reality is many applications developed for those devices try to harvest data from the user, often without their consent. Contact details, location data, correlation to other apps installed, and so on, in order to make money.
The reality is that this is unethical without explicit consent, and nothing will stop these actors except technical barriers to this malicious activity.
Your desire to sleep in your apartment with the windows open and doors unlocked and cameras off is yours, but if there is a binary decision of "have these protections or not", the answer is clear.
The online data privacy crisis isn't really about data or the bad actors, but the lack of understandability and control over our own electronics.
To solve the problem you need to make users more involved, remove automation in favor of manual processes but simplified as much as possible. "Protections" are mostly band-aid hiding the real cause.
>protection against ... your own device? Why is your device harming you to begin with?
Yes. Because some apps do more than they claim to do, and users are unaware, and thinking that all citizens can be perfectly informed and thus do not need to put guardrails on app permissions is foolish.
>but the lack of understandability and control over our own electronics.
The lack of control over the data that can be extracted by bad actors that seem like good actors.
>"Protections" are mostly band-aid hiding the real cause.
The real cause is that humans can be malicious, others can be fooled, and the first goes after the second.
All humans are fallible, but it may be out of your control. There is no other human between you and your device.
> Yes. Because some apps do more than they claim to do, and users are unaware, and thinking that all citizens can be perfectly informed and thus do not need to put guardrails on app permissions is foolish.
Why do you even have to trust what apps say? That's my problem with this reasoning, we are under the assumption that programs control your device and that nothing can be done about it except adding warnings. Why do programs need instructions to access data? How about forcing the user to plug any environment access into the app? Anything that isn't plugged cannot be accessed, no trust required.
> The lack of control over the data that can be extracted by bad actors that seem like good actors.
The solution is to give control over the data, not with protection, but understanding. You are transforming this tech problem into a human problem.
> The real cause is that humans can be malicious, others can be fooled, and the first goes after the second.
Again no human between you and your device/program. We however decided that software can be malicious.
It's absolutely technically viable to build an app store that incentivizes using the minimum amount of permissions possible, or to even feed fake data to overly nosy apps. In fact it's been done, but it'll be a cold day in hell before Google makes it easy.
Governments just can't seem to get their act together on this. Its pointless to revisit the spectrum of reasons ranging from incompetency to complicity. If you want a populist framing this is like knowingly lowering the gates of the castle and letting expert pickpockets rush in and have a field day with the unsuspecting citizens.
Maybe stressing that this inaction undermines the future of the digital economy and society would fly better with the political class. Digitization is our bright "future", no?
Economic actors will act according to the signals they get from government and its institutions as to what is allowed. If those signals are non-existing or mixed they will invest in the "wrong" direction.
On a bit of a philosophical tangent: Targeted ads increase revenues because they are focused on people with a higher proabability of responding positively to the ads. If you asume agency of the user then this is a good thing, a win-win. But by treating this negatively you are asuming that the user has no agency over their actions. They reply to the ad, but it hurts them or they don't really want to. And we should protect users from this "temptation". This is the line of reasoning behind banning the sale of addictive substances to minors. Note that I am not talking about privacy issues, only about the quoted reservation which is quite common.
Also, the fact that misinformation campaigns work suggests that misinformation is at least one possible purpose of advertising.
An ad can target an individual about their dandruff issue which only works because previously the non-targeted ads created social stigma around it. It's all connected.
Ads are fucking evil. No amount of rationalization can get around that. The only reason we even attempt to normalize this is because we have to generate profits at all costs.
I'd argue misinformation is embedded into advertising. There's a reason "honest ads" are a meme. Aside from a few exceptions, misinformation is the entire point of the ad: buy my thing because it's the best (it isn't) and will solve all your problems (it won't) and if you don't you're a loser (you aren't).
The following strategy employed by producer fits the bill.
https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-09-netflix-algorithm-facebo...
'Norsemen' producer gamed Netflix's algorithm with Facebook ads He was pretty sure Minnesota residents would dig the Viking comedy.
If not, fuck them. I'll do everything I can to block ads and poison their data on me.
My PHIL101 prof is rolling in his grave right now.
"Actually, spying on people is a good thing since blocking the spying is robbing them of agency. I thought you people liked having agency?!?1"
Our minds are sacred, our cognitive functions are inalienable. Not a single corporation on this planet is entitled to this. Our attention belongs to us. It's not currency to pay for services with. It's not a commodity for them to sell to the highest bidder. They don't get to insert their brands into our brains without our consent. That should be considered mind rape and any measures taken to stop it should be considered legitimate self-defense.
Advertisers spend money with the aim of convincing strangers. There is always a conflict of interest.
Why not? Can't you go to a store and ask to see products? Open an app and see what they have to offer you?
When you seek the products out, it's not advertising, it's information.
Also, without advertising, search engines and the web would be a lot more trustworthy than they are today. When searching I used to get many real websites created by humans, now I see ad-funded AI-generated utterly worthless SEO spam. Advertising is literally the root cause of the enshittification of the web.
I would rather keep advertisements specifically restricted only to those who already have a need, and are interested in choosing a commercial solution for that need.
To take your point further, why not abolish, ban luxury market segment. A $10 shirt does the same job of $500 one. Well Apple created a necessity in making you to buy a $1000 dollar phone, it does the same job as $400 one.
I would allow market place to decide what new ideas should take hold in society. Taking an uber or online dating was frowned upon, not anymore. People can change, society can adapt, better processes can be put in place to avoid hurt sentiments of all parties involved.
Also, congratulations on your surplus income. Many people do not enjoy that luxury.
Consider another area where recommendation results in ecommerce like activity. Food delivery apps. One could say why not visit the restaurant and eat there. Through delivery apps, I come to know about new items / cuisines, restaurants, their reviews and buy them. In fact the situation is far more worse in delivery apps because you can't return a food item once tasted. Not so with other category of products like clothings, etc.
I feel like Benedicts Evans should make a primer on why ads exists and how better ads could serve society.
> Through delivery apps, I come to know about new items / cuisines, restaurants, their reviews and buy them.
I use these store and delivery apps extremely often. I have issues with their tracking of my behavior but I don't consider them to be advertising at all.
I opened the app because I wanted to see the products and offers. That's not advertising, that's information which I specifically requested. Advertising is when the app gets in my face with nonsense I couldn't care less about while I'm trying to do something else.
Advertisements are inherently untrustworthy: you must assume ads are showing you the positives and hiding the negatives.
Politicians / media are inherently untrustworthy. Yet society chugs along.
Tell that to the people who need to watch a YouTube video and don't want to punch in their credit-card info. Unless someone is picking up the hosting and delivery costs, advertising will always make the most sense.
Now, don't get me wrong; ad-free YouTube at no cost would be great! It's not a business though, and without advertising arguably none of those services would exist. I don't know what you are proposing if not completely tearing-down our relatively accessible status-quo.
"Need" is too strong a word. Nobody "needs" to watch a YouTube video. Maybe they want to watch one.
> without advertising arguably none of those services would exist
Then let their existence cease. They're corporations. They don't have human rights. They aren't entitled to life.
> I don't know what you are proposing if not completely tearing-down our relatively accessible status-quo.
It's exactly what I am proposing. A status quo where mind rape is normalized for the sake of convenience should not be allowed to exist.
Circumstantially, maybe not. In high school and college, I had plenty of homework assignments that involved a YouTube video. After classes, YouTube continued to be the biggest asset to my professional development. Having access to conference talks and long-form tutorials changed my life.
For the sake of argument, let's just say I'm fixing my sink and the first result on 5 search engines is a YouTube video. What do you expect the average person to do next?
> It's exactly what I am proposing.
Well, good luck with that. I'm very curious to see who shows up to pick up the bill in your new world. It sorta sounds like your mental model feigns the existence of capitalism and free will, though.
I will pick up the bill for my own consumption. I have less than zero tolerance for advertising but I still buy a lot of stuff. The difference is I do it on my own terms. I won't have them actively advertising to me. When I want something, I'll ask them. When I actively seek out their products it's not advertising but information.
Youtube's giant selection of people demonstrating every DIY repair topic (car repair, appliance repair, iPhone battery replace, etc) you can think of -- that's available nowhere else -- has literally saved me thousands of dollars (no exaggeration).
I guess one could twist that into "you didn't really _need_ to save thousands of dollar$, you just _wanted_ to."
Youtube is much more than frivolous music videos and you're too dismissive of how it helps people.
EDIT REPLY TO: "Doesn't justify their advertising."
I wasn't responding to the advertising business model. My issue was the "nobody _needs_ to watch a Youtube video" is way too dismissive.
>There's always other sources of information. There's always better sources of information.
Not always. Last week, I needed to replace an oxygen sensor on my truck and wanted some guidance on how to do it. Yes, a pdf of a vehicle service manual has diagrams etc but that book doesn't show a video of someone actually doing it. I need to see somebody actually put a wrench on the the bolts and unplug the sensor cable. I watched 5 different mechanics do it and I'm glad I did because there are some tricky issues that my inexperience would not have solved on my own. Vimeo and other video services didn't have this car repair content. Only Youtube.
Doesn't justify their invasive advertising.
> There's always other sources of information
There are, sometimes, different sources of information (you would be giving up a massive amount of resources).
> There's always better sources of information
Not necessarily. Sometimes information is scarce and hard to find.
> I make it a point to read books now. Libraries should be valued
That is not an exclusive alternative.
It's a pipe dream now, with the exploitative business models and consumer addictions well established, but there's an alternative history of the internet where this could have happened.
As someone that grew up poor but now works in tech, I'm very hesitant to say that people paying for things is better than the ad-driven status quo.
A good portion of people just wouldn't be able to pay and likely have a worse life by their standards (not yours or mine).
But it seems advertising can’t be completely avoided (as much as I’d like it to). I’ll go out of my way to spend money wherever it removes ads (eg YouTube, podcasts, etc), but no amount of money will remove the billboards I have to drive by on the way to work. I’ll never be able to go to a sports event without advertisers bidding for my attention.
You would think at least some of those issues could be avoided by living somewhere “more expensive”, but it seems like affluent areas actually have more ads.
What measures can we possibly take?
Nb: I recently took a trip to the USA and was appalled that they play full volume video advertisements while you’re filling up with gas. At least that’s not a practice that’s caught on elsewhere.
Including elsewhere in the USA.
We build technology.
The number one example is of course uBlock Origin. It shows people a better world with no strings attached. So good it should be built into browsers. It can't block ads in videos... Yet. How long until someone makes an AI video filterer that deletes ads from video streams though? Have the AI watch ads so we don't have to. Given this technology, how long until augmented reality glasses with adblocking builtin start showing up?
São Paulo got rid of billboards in 2006: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa>
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
On most of these pumps you can push the second to top button on the right side of the screen to mute the ad.
According to the guy that owns the gas station down the street from me, this gets tracked and if the owner/advertisers see that enough people are muting the ads and they're not profitable, they'll stop paying to have them play at the pumps.
I don't want to be too pedantic, but it's worth noting that having a substantial amount of money can indeed resolve this issue.
For instance, being chauffeured means you don't have to pay any attention to the road unless you choose to do so.
Moreover, ad-free services like NFL Red Zone are available, or to your point about attending a sporting event with sufficient wealth having a private box can insulate you from 99% of sports event advertising.
For whatever reason there are no (or very few) billboards in Northern Virginia, so that's one option. I wish there were more places like that, it's so refreshing driving through and not being bombarded with ads fighting for my attention (which is supposed to be on the road...).
But in general I think you're right it's extremely hard to get away from. I think the main reason it's hard to "buy out" of advertising it that the very fact that you can afford to "buy out" makes you that much more valuable to advertisers.
> Nb: I recently took a trip to the USA and was appalled that they play full volume video advertisements while you’re filling up with gas. At least that’s not a practice that’s caught on elsewhere.
In case you visit again or it comes up for others, you should be able to push the second button from the top on the left to mute the video.
Are you talking about cities? Most affluent people in the US live in quiet suburbs
> I recently took a trip to the USA and was appalled that they play full volume video advertisements while you’re filling up with gas
I've lived in the US for most of my life and I've never seen anything like that. You gotta specify what part of the US you're talking about because that's a very weird thing for you to assume is common
You consent by going to free youtube.
Big ads in cities are more difficult to avoid, but then again, someone wearing a sports shirt of his favourite soccer club is doing advertisement. Someone wearing a cross for his religion, etc.
I don't think drawing a arbitary line and saying "this is mindrape" and "this is legit" is really working.
That being said, I do want to paintball big ads and alike.
Yeah, but those give more room for consent than something like a youtube ad.
You passively see those advertisements while doing something else. When you see a television or youtube ad, your full attention is much more likely on the computer and on that ad.
Who forces you to watch youtube?
You consented to being touched by wearing that clothing.
But my point was, that it is not so simple.
I always get weird looks when, watching TV, I change channels during ads.
I don't change channels when watching TV, I mute it and pick up my phone until it ends.
Some people don't have complete and absolute agency, impulsive buying is a known issue. I bring this up because I have to constantly monitor my impulsivity due to ADHD, it creates a struggle when targeted ads bombard me with interesting stuff that I don't need but my brain tells me "but it could be useful for X".
It's exhausting, I don't want it (or at least would like to have more control over) but I can't shield myself completely from targeted ads, ad blockers on the web help a lot, and I should completely avoid popular apps with targeted ads like Instagram. I would like to see what my close friends are up to on their Instagram Stories but I simply shouldn't use it as I normally get bombarded by "interesting" ads all the time which drains me by constantly battling impulsivity.
If I want a product I'll search for it. I don't want things coming to me, I want to go to them.
Who has more agency, who is more free here: a man who is a drug addict or a man who isn't a drug addict but otherwise would be without drug laws and shaming?
You may say the drug addict has more agency. You might be right, but it's not good for him or his family, and that's where law and shame come in to protect him from "ill-agency".
>This is the line of reasoning behind banning the sale of addictive substances to minors
Yes.
Can we all agree this is insane or am I going insane?
I simply cannot rationalize this. It's gross.
Without ads, how are companies supposed to get the word out about their product?
Email seems like a worse medium. Calls / texts even worse. Blog spam / SEO content is maybe the least worst? Paid (biased) reviews?
Without ads, we'd probably see a lot more paid placements (which might not be labeled as an advertisement, similar to food companies buying prime shelf space in supermarkets unbeknownst to shoppers). More influencers pushing brands directly to audiences (another form of paid placements).
I won't argue that ads are a good thing, but they serve a role in the economy. It's not obvious to me what would happen if companies suddenly couldn't advertise anymore.
E.g. you open a new restaurant. Is it ok for a restaurant to geotarget ads to the local residents? Buy an ad in the newspaper? Or do we say "not allowed" and rely on word of mouth?
But in the majority of cases those advertisements are lies. Fake photos, fake reviews, fake claims, fake everything. I can't justify accepting all that lying just to "get your word out". That's not what's being done.
Paid placements are already ubiquitous.
The restaurant example is all about the small company, which already gets screwed with current marketing landscape. They put tons of money into a black box with Google/Meta Ads hoping it'll work. They say X amount of people saw your ad, most of the times you can't track any real effect from these ads, and you have to accept it. The recent issues with YouTube counting ads incorrectly is most certainly not a unique incident and we have no clue what's actually happening.
Maybe if all we had were these small local businesses advertising it could actually be useful. After all, those are not the ones collecting copious amounts of data violating everyone's privacy for the sole purpose of selling ads.
Perhaps a version of opt-in ads or trustworthy places where you can get real recommendations are the way to go. But because of ads and SEO now this was also destroyed. I find it infuriating that when you do want to buy something, you have to sift through so many garbage lists created for the sole purpose of showing ads and referrals. Ultimately you can only really trust a few experts sources for basically anything. The normal folks who fall for the "top X" list websites or the ads get screwed the same way because those are just another form of false advertisement.
I don't know if there's a perfect solution here, but it damn well isn't the one we've got.
Also unfortunate on the B2B side, sites like G2 and Capterra (basically yelp with B2B) have both turned into pay to play.
Then again, I’m not even sure what a realistic business model would be for a unbiased review site. (Maybe the answer is it shouldn’t have a business model at all)
There's a reason threads here on HN in the category of "what did you buy/read/do recently?" are so popular. People want reliable information that advertisement is definitely not giving us.
Thinking about it, nothing beats recommendation from a known trusted individual. Be it for a restaurant, an appliance, a car, etc.
This tells me how little advertising is about the discoverability of products/services. This creation of needs is 99.9% of the time unnecessary. It's only there because people want to sell regardless of how useless their product is.
If people need something, they will search for it.
That's hand-wavy and not entirely true. I have full agency and still it's easier to ignore or mentally block out an ad about cattle supplements (I don't own cattle) than it is an ad about an accounting conference (I need continuing education credits for my CPA).
Ads are interruptive by design. The more targeted an ad is, the more it slows me down in my day. That is bad for me
No? Ok. Would it be okay if I ask you that another 10 to 20 times today while you’re in the middle of other things?
Advertising sucks.
That is, profiling does very little for the vast majority users, but at a cost of massive privacy issues. Trying to look at one without considering the other is disingenuous at best.
I would have a slightly better opinion of targetted ads if you could see how each ad you see was targeted.
"You are seeing this ad on ShittySite.com because you clicked on an article about new cars on NewsSite.com 13 days ago and searched for 'Tesla' 10 days ago and subscribed to the 'Car Buyers' newsletter 8 days ago and viewed a video about used cars 7 days ago and ..."
By gathering enough data it become possible to predict more and more of our individual behaviour; I believe that keeping this as hard as possible is a noble cause.
I think a relevant difference is between "intent" related ads, say keyword ads on Google: I search for a thing and get the related info. There are cases where this is okay and helps to discover things.
And the pure tracking based ads, trying to influence me to do things I didn't inherently plan to do.
I heavily dislike the life manipulation, which often enough also seems to work. (As proven by bug companies spending tons of money on ads)
Or in a different realm: I'm fine with political parties having room to share their ideas and goals and advertise for them, but if companies use targeted ads to send very specific ads to different demographics, there can't be a proper debate anymore as everybody saw something different (maybe even contradicting) and don't know where others are becoming from (see Cambridge Analytica) This is absolutely harmful for society.
I have no problem with targeted ads, in fact I prefer them. If I'm browsing a climbing subreddit, show me ads for climbing gear. If I'm searching for luggage online, show me ads for suitcases.
What I strenuously object to is sharing data outside of a specific vendor. If I'm browsing for suitcases on eaglecreek.com, Google and Facebook should never know and never be able to serve me any ads based on something I did outside of their services.
When I'm asked for permission to "share data with a third-party" I want to know who that third-party is? Will it be the same tomorrow as it is today? What will the third-party do with the PII? If the third-party is someone I trust and would value a working with then I might agree to it. But it's just as likely to be an organization I detest. The information is out there in press releases, journals, and legal documents. But collecting, compiling, and cross-referencing isn't something that can be done on the spot when that consent prompt is displayed. How am I supposed to make an informed decision on how to answer?
Restricting what advertisers can do isn't taking agency away from me. It's giving me the support to better exercise my choice against better armed adversaries.
It is not that this government lacks the expertise or creativity. Yearly aerial images are collected to search for illegal buildings and extensions. The same government's tax department actively scrapes the web and social media to collect and store personal data to create a fraud profile on all their citizens.[0]
[0]: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/09/tax-office-scraped-social-m...
Spam was made “illegal” more than a decade ago in the US and in the EU. It did not reduce the amount of spam. The same thing with GDPR: only honest and good actors suffer, while dishonest actors or megacorps like Google get an advantage and because of this advantage they manage to grow their business.
why the distinction? if spam is illegal, it doesn't matter your size or incorporation status. if you break the rules, you've broken the rules. the ability to spam doesn't really increase by size of corp. a single person can hire services to spam just as effectively has evilCorp
A small company that wants to survive has to spend a lot of effort and engineering hours becoming compliant with the legislation. If they fail to do so, the following legal battle and potential fines have a high probability of bankrupting them. They must be proactive to avoid this.
Large corporations instead get to be reactive. They comply where it’s convenient and otherwise operate on an “ask forgiveness later” mindset. Legal battles and billion dollar fines barely register and instead of becoming destructive events, just become minor taxes on doing business.
As much as I appreciate the spirit of the legislation, the implementation has actually empowered large companies and is squeezing out small business.
In the case of being a small business, it’s not even about being shady. Imagine you were building a simple step tracking database for a pedometer app. All it does is store a user id and some daily steps. You have zero intent to market or share it in any way, no ad personalization, no third parties, etc. Before GDPR you’d just spin this up and be fine. Now you need to deal with data consent policies, data deletion tools, potential exfiltration policies if your DB isn’t in the EU, etc. Enjoy the engineering and legal costs there.
Mega corp can just ignore most of this and pay later. It’s a massive difference.
transmitting that information to the company servers is a decision that can easily be not made to do, and when it is, you're already at risk. so, why do it?
For small companies the rules, especially on cookies, are intimidating and therefore ignored - however because are small so is the impact of it. For larger companies, the financial incentive to bend the privacy rules is significant. And there are the evilCorps like Uber who have a trample the rules strategy [0] (and any platform that abuses workers rights). Not sure how this relates to privacy rules, but it feeds the assumption that if a company ignores one set of rules, they are also inclined to break other rules.
An interesting niche I have worked in, social enterprises, a lot of people have a strong moral high ground feeling. Their message is supposedly not commercial, or it has importance while in fact it is still commercial (fund raising, an event, ...). And especially these companies get a lot of attention.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_involving_Uber#:....
No, it wasn't. CAN-SPAM regulation lives up to its name, it legalises spamming so long as an exceptionally low baseline is met.
(see Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed by Mozilla, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37443644 )
or third party owned eavesdroppers. Some contexts are leaving little option (all products demanding privacy loss): this is where the big battle will lie.
Got a screenshot to share? That's extraordinary
But overall, nowadays it's at least possible to limit the impact – compared to Lollipop era for example, when everything suddenly started to look modern, unified and nice, but still full of the same old holes.
Not all third-parties are the same.
Certain termination reports do contain small memory dumps and/or register values, so theoretically could could contain decodable PII. This is something the OS vendor provides, not the developer of the app or the crash reporter.
Pseudonymous information always has a high risk of being abused for fingerprinting and thus denonymising. I feel that there needs to be a trade-off though: on public datasets, people should be very careful with pseudonymous identifiers. On things like crash diagnostics that are never meant to be shared I feel they're perfectly fine. That's why I dislike a general discussion where all PII is bad and evil without context.
Do you mean monitoring and analytics in general don't improve products? Or that "product improvement" is a commonly used excuse to harvest user data?
These tools are increasingly developing new features that allow them to act more like a "CDP", essentially allowing you to send data from the tool to something else.
Want to send data from Amplitude to Facebook? That's easy https://amplitude.com/blog/amplitude-customer-data-platform
What they should be judged on is whether people understand what they are doing, and if that clarity empowers people to support advertising approaches. Several generations of technologists have dreamed of a user-controlled platform to broadcast information, like “I’m in the market for a toaster” and get relevant offers. Ad markets and platforms would not make less money if they empowered users to tell you what they are interested in and to stop showing ads about crypto and gambling.
Yes, sometimes, but an important part of it is blunt: see the post in this page of the user who installed a controversial communication application (not WsA) and found that the messages were forwarded to FB... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37506851 )
> whether people understand what they are doing
Yes. Partially it is a matter of awareness. But there is also a large part of the population which does not care about privacy - which also reveals a perception of the world that may be outdated ("nothing to hide to decent authorities" is the idea that many hold because usual to them).
> What they should be judged on is whether people understand what they are doing
Nope, it's waaayy easier to regulate this at the root of the problem rather than going person by person asking if they understand a 15-page legalese EULA they did not read.
Last week it blocked 31000 attempts to track me by apps on my smartphone.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/p-app-tracking-...
But it's not as privacy-friendly as you'd think. For example all favorites and bookmarks favicons are routed through their server. Which would be nice as an option, but you can't opt out. They pinky-swear they don't log it, though.
https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527#issuecommen...
https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/pull/878
Thanks
I need to be able to download an app and tell the OS “this app cannot access the internet in any way shape or form”.
It won’t solve all the problems. But at least for apps like “alarm clock” or whatever that should be able to work offline, the OS should guarantee it remains offline.
- Windows: Simplewall (uses native WPF for filtering), Portmaster (interactive firewall, uses custom kernel extension).
- macOS: LuLu or Little Snitch (they all use a native filtering API, which unfortunately is not perfect: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/6/3.html).
- Linux: OpenSnitch, denying network permission to Flatpak apps.
- Android: Rethink, NetGuard; GrapheneOS has app network permission natively.
iOS is the only OS where no application firewall is available, although if you don't use Wi-Fi, you can block apps from using cellular data.
(I co-develop a FOSS network monitor for Android)
Yes, but: "OS level" firewalls are as weak as the OS itself (as in, if an app gets root, all the sandboxing and firewalling is pretty much done for). One probably must use an external firewall for better protection, but the problem is of course, one can't expect to carry it around everywhere. While for smartphones, the external firewall (fronting an AP / Wifi) is bypassed when using mobile data.
For unprivileged installed apps (as opposed to OEM apps), perhaps a un-rootable OS-level firewall works.
Change any of these factors and the problem solves itself:
- More expensive storage media.
- Remove the value that can be extracted from data (eg. nerfing the advertisment based business model)
- Bigger consequences for mishandling data (eg. fines >100% or prison sentences for responsible leadership would be a good start).
- Increased probability of experiencing consequences in the first place (eg. more effective enforcement of regulations).
Effectively these are the levers that you can push on. 1,2 and 4 seem difficult to move much, which leaves 3.
It’s the same with malicious spammers, why would they ever stop when the consequences are basically nothing.
Google only shows the most egregious permission flags in normal Android builds. They also for some reason opted to bundle a few completely unrelated permissions into the phone call permission notification (iirc it's for example the notif shown if you want access to bluetooth devices).
I think there's a few XPosed plugins that let you show prompts for the ones Google doesn't let you decide on if you don't want to go full custom ROM. They can also feed fake data so your personal data isn't compromised.
Just thinking of crashlytics, which is incredibly popular, and on it's own, isn't terribly invasive. But of course, google now owns it, so every time you go to your console, google is constantly pushing some further invasion of privacy to improve your insights.
There's load of things, even apart from deliberately malicious libraries, that will use analytics to fund their free tools. What do you know about your easy to implement cloud synching db that saves so much time?
There's a very good reason why everything is a stupid app when it could do fine with a website or PWA.
Of course, the issue is always with other apps that don't have a website version and require the internet to work. There, one needs to be much more careful about what he installs, and to prefer open source when possible.
They mainly want you to use the app so they can collect more data obviously.
Unlawful - true. But also no different than your usual website attempting to load Google Tag Manager, Analytics or some Facebook garbage before user has a chance to consent.
Implement a (sane) version of a cookie banner which sets a cookie containing the information that the user is fine with loading external libraries or not. That cookie itself is classified as a technical cookie if only used for that reason and will not require "permission" from the user. That's how this would be implemented in a GDPR-compliant way.
If the cookie is set, you can load the respective external scripts and tools. If not, you don't.
> What can I do about the transitive dependencies that my dependencies load?
That's trickier one and probably more into the legal side, as in informing the user that those dependencies exist and how they correlate to each other.
Transitive dependencies, hm… auditing carefully and being selective about what to add might be my best take.
Apps is a whole different story.
Don't load it until you have given the choice to the user. Dynamically load after that, or wait for the next server round-trip.
> What can I do about the transitive dependencies that my dependencies load?
This is a significant problem for which I don't have an easier solution than making a lot of effort to properly audit and monitor your supply chain.
If you aren't sure that nothing in your supply chain is doing something dodgy, how do you justify pushing it to your users (or, at least, doing so without appropriate warning)?
I have NetFence firewall installed and the amount of API requests to third party systems applications make, including bank applications is surprisingly high. These include sending metrics and telemetry to third parties. Location Data, whether GPS is on or off and these toggles can be seen within the API call.
app.adjust.com
app-measurement.com
eu-aa-online-metrix.net
firebaselogging-pa.googleapis.com
Are just a few domains these app's make a call too. Why?
I'm unsure what they mean by "storage of data on the [...] device" because you can't use an App without having first installed it (which uses your device's storage already), so doesn't the app have reasonable implicit permission to make use of the user's storage?
...while the part about an app being able to "access" stored data is ambiguous: does that include the app reading its own resource/assets data from its installed app-package/directory? Or if it's referring to apps reading from the user's own (i.e. private) data like Contacts database, photos, GPS sensors, etc - then as far as I'm concerned that's not a legal or policy question, but a clear and gaping security hole in the OS because the app was somehow able to break out of the sandbox to read into other data-stores on the user's device.
“Implicit permission” does not sound like “free, informed, specific and unambiguous consent”. Furthermore, the directive (ePrivacy, article 5(3)) states that consent is valid only if the user was provided with clear information about the purposes of the processing beforehand.
> does that include the app reading its own resource/assets data from its installed app-package/directory?
An app reading its own data will fall under the “strictly necessary” exception of the directive (cf. ePrivacy 5(3)). Reading other databases will depend on the purpose.
From what I understand, you can ask for an IP if it is required for the application's functionality, i.e. "due to technical limitations, we need to know where to send the response", but you cannot automatically use it for marketing purposes, i.e. "sell the IP to third-party advertisers which can then build a profile of that IP's site visiting behavior".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capi...
> Max [Schrems, a lawyer and privacy activist] had had the idea of a professional privacy enforcement NGO (similar to consumer rights organizations) that brings cases against large corporations on behalf of the users for a while and was ultimately able to realize it through noyb
All they had to do was to legislate a statutory amount someone could claim in case of a privacy violation and the problems would've disappeared overnight by companies set up to litigate on behalf of consumers in exchange for a cut.
If the regulators can't, let someone else do the job.
In Denmark and I assume in Norway if you have been harmed by a governmental organization you have to complain and spend lots of time to deal with the problem and in the end get nothing for the time, you get a worthless apology and change of policy for what harmed you in the first place, and then wasted years, and nothing is done to right the hurt or damage you suffered.
Better the American way as an opportunity, however limited, to make the powerful suffer in kind.
Failing to see the larger picture people wanted these enclaves. An no, even Apple wants to make their environment attractive and that means appeasing advertisers.
Overall the behavior of legitimate software in a PC or Mac environment is just far better, it isn't even a competition.
Unfortunately, all this stuff is going in one direction.
There are many different methods you can use to share a file, including but not limited to Dropbox and floppy drives. Your data is a file, or maybe it's an SQL table! Sharing a file can be done by anyone, but be careful though, as sharing an SQL table needs to be done trained professionals. DO NOT ATTEMPT SHARING AN SQL TABLE WITHOUT PROPER SUPERVISION.
Seriously, what's the news/content here? Is mobile apps not complying with EU regulations noteworthy in any way?
And there's strong(er) privacy laws is California USA, the EU, Switzerland, and the UK. That's just off the top of my head. So not just EU law being broken here.