I mean, I know that adtech spy on us a lot, but I didn't knew for example that using Bluetooth while the app is shut down was possible.
Makes me very wary even of dumbphones, for example I bought a dumbphone recently, and yet it came with Facebook and Google Assistant both pre-installed.
> Makes me very wary even of dumbphones
If you care about it, consider GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone, which run FLOSS and have hardware kill switches for microphone and other things.
Last time I checked in with the Librem project, the phone was completely unusable as a phone because the power management and in particular the sleep mode wasn't working properly. Sometimes the phone would wake up from sleep, and since the power management was buggy it would blow through the entire battery charge in an hour.
So essentially you'd need a backup phone for your Librem 5 because you never know if it'll be dead when you need to call 911.
In my country all phones must have permission from the government to operate, and the phone manufacturer that need to ask this permission in first place, any phone detected by cell towers that aren't one of them, can be legally banned from the network (not just YOUR phone, but all identical model phones!)
On modern Android versions, there's some serious limitations on apps running in the background at all. In most cases, if you want your app to run in the background, you gotta put up a notification that is displayed the whole time that background service is running.
Oh and also. Scanning for bluetooth devices is a fairly battery-consuming activity as far as I can tell.
Whatever the opinion on tracking, Google definitely carves out their own moats and are hypocritical in a lot of respects. Arguably pushing changes to hurt their small competition given they have better/more pervasive personalized tracking without the low hanging fruit.
Unfortunately they went so hard on dumbphone specs that it ran poorly, kept crashing all the time because it kept running out of ram. (it had 256mb of RAM I believe, or 128, don't remember, one of the two).
And now that so many of us leave BT on all the time for our BT earbuds and airpods, I'd assume it's become better at tracking, not worse
How can we teach it to them?
How did you think for example notifications were pushed to Bluetooth smart watches?
This article's title and narrative makes it sound like Facebook is using bluetooth fingerprinting to geolocate users against their wishes, and that Android's new permission will end that. However reading the text carefully it never actually claims Facebook is currently doing that. Are they or not? Is this article a hypothetical? That seems very disingenuous but also very typical of the kind of stories on privacy and advertising I see online.
Facebook isn't open-source, so it's hard to analyze what the app does, but not impossible, and Facebook is under a lot of scrutiny.
Facebook maybe thought this day would never arrive and could have avoided that by doing their own mobile OS too.
Well, maybe they declared this battle as lost and focused on the next one: VR. Problem is that VR took too long to arrive and death on mobile can kill Facebook?
Seriously wondering what impact this would have on the world other than a positive one?
But I personally agree with you. My world will be better without it.
Facebook owns the most popular messaging app in the world (WhatsApp) and two of the most popular social networks in the world (Facebook, Instagram). Are they really in trouble because of the Android/iOS changes?
They can still do ads without tracking, but would that still be a trillion dollar business?
My understanding is that even the latest version of android phones home your location in real-time. Which google uses itself for ads.
Do you have a source? Google providing a location-based service for Android OS functionality is different from using it for ads.
Both are really high cost, complex, multi-year bets with lots of moving parts and no real hint of consumer adoption/market size until way after the ship's sailed.
In my opinion, as a consumer, they're really on the path to make VR happen and their wrist-based tech and Oculus is very promising. What VR still needs, after all those years since it's been accessible to the general public, is a killer app, and one can only guess why no one has developed it yet.
The only app that I could imagine bringing mainstream appeal would be a Ready Player One Oasis kind of thing (I've only seen movie, not read the book), but seeing and testing all the social vr apps we have now, the Oasis is the most fantasy thing about that universe.
Ubiquitous computing may be the next step from there. Something like “the world is the computer and you just interact with it”.
Ar might be big, but vr is just silly
Between wp8 and WM10, they merged the phone team with the regular OS team, and eliminated (or at least gutted) their QA teams, and they decided to target the high end market only. There were no low spec WM10 phones, and there hadn't been many high end buyers anyway, so who was going to buy WM10? And upgrading to WM10, when available, was often a bad experience.
Also, mobile Edge had a nicer renderer than mobile IE, but it was sooooo much worse UX (laggy, slow, navigation buttons went into some sort of button press queue to be resolved seconds later). When you've driven away app developers, ruining the browser isn't a good choice.
So, it's not that you needed more money (although I'm sure it would help), you also need to not abandon the market niche you found in search of an unobtainable, but potentially more lucrative one, and you need to make releases be consistently better each time. (It would also help if one of the big players stumbled, but you can't count on that).
A Facebook phone probably would give even more critical reception ...
IIRC only a very few use cases exist where such kind of location data is absolutely essential. They’re still gonna get loads of data from other sources, which would be good enough targeting for most advertisers.
If I have to choose only between Facebook and Google, I'd choose Google to have my data.
I feel the same way as you but not because I think one is less evil. Rather, it's because Google brings me much more value in its search engine and productivity suite.
People are still using Facebook, posting pictures, tagging people they know, checking into locations, posting what they buy and so on.
Still pently of information to track and sell to advertisers.
This is a win win for Google, slow down competition and give the illusion of privacy to users.
Anyway, if you post an image to Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, the EXIF data has your location, or it can be solved from the content of the image.
That seems to be the theme with Facebook, they collect a ton of information that isn't obviously useful. So what do Facebook know that the rest of us don't? Because the engineers at Facebook aren't stupid, they must have a reason for collecting all this stuff. Perhaps it's just in case they might find a use case some day?
The most obvious use, I would think, is to train machine learning model. Not necessarily neural networks, it could be much simpler models. Even if you don't need the data now, it can be useful to store it for later use. Maybe at some point in the future a new model will be able to see patterns that are useful. I think they operate based on the principle that data is a valuable resource, even if not immediately useful. How much data they have about their users is one of their key advantages over smaller players.
In general though, more data about you, such as locations you visit, people you're friends with, activities you do, gives them more understanding of what kind of person you are, which is undoubtedly useful when it comes to try and sell you stuff. For example, think about friends you know really well. Presumably, you have some idea of what kinds of things they would like to buy for themselves. That's because you have a good mental model of what kind of person they are and what they like, what they might be interested in.
Facebook maybe has one big advantage over Google, which is that they are a social network. They can try to influence your tastes based on the idea that you are likely to want to try things that your friends are into. They can subtly or not so subtly show you things your friends are doing with the hope that you will want to try or buy those things too.
I also think there was a big push by these folks to also try to determine when you visited places to show that ads worked.. by getting your location at place X on this day and they showed an ad with 24 hours before for example.
F and G are also into people's "purchase history" / (debit card transactions, loyalty card data) for the same reason aren't I think (?)
I doubt FB is selling location to repo men like other location brokers - but that could change.
Dunno if ICE and other letter agencies buy loca data from F and G.. but like the Verizon thing about people's info is the new oil - gotta remember oil is used to create many more things than just gas. Sprint made more than a few pennies being forced to give up data, and so do others.
Certainly makes marketing dollars well spent when you can prove effectiveness and vice versa.
Like, even if you only leave your home town once every two years, it might be worth more to facebook on that special occasion than the rest of the time.
I am assuming the file browsing permission bypasses any exif stripping - which maybe is why so many apps ask for it it...
Which I wish they did...
I don't know, it's kind of a stupid idea, give Facebook an image and yet the expectation is, they're not supposed to know or understand anything about it?
If Facebook simply have their app say it won't work without accepting this, then I very, very much doubt that anything but a miniscule number of people would be uninstalling the app.
I saw on some new android phones something called "privacy features" which would mean not giving access to contacts for example. The problem is all apps know you are using this feature and they nag you to turn it off. Whats the point then? How I want the thing to be, "oh, the contacts permission is given but nothing here. Oh well. ". Same for location and SMS and other stuff.
I remember old ios, circa ios 5-6 had app permissions behind a password. I would take family phones and lock down location and contacts behind a password (it couldand inapp purchases prevent access to store and iTunes and browser if I remember) so for giving kids this this would be great.
That has never come to android.
Yes, that is a good idea. The user could also program in more elaborate filters, e.g. to expose a subset of contacts data, random data instead of the actual data, spoofed locations, etc. Also can be distinguish read-only or read/write, etc. (If the user does not have all of these elaborate options and more, then the app writer might realize what is happening and then might program it to complain if there is nothing there. Also, such options can be helpful for testing purpose as well as for user customizability, too.)
(I don't use the cell phone, but nevertheless such thing like you mentioned can be good idea.)
That's actually a good idea. I wonder if any Android distros do this. In theory, it should be possible, but I don't know how tricky it would be to implement.
Thanks, I hate it.
These companies that manipulate population into buying products they don't want or need are the mythical "broken window".
Nobody mention how all this online business contributes to global warming. Factories produce useless products, that need to be stored, delivered, disposed of...
Because they're not really in charge anymore.
Why would they? These companies are collecting the data the government wants, it's a free service for the government and they only have to ask for the data when they need it.
Because then they won't receive a few million $$ in donation for the next campaign.
However, governments (at least some) are trying; GDPR is a step in that direction, but it has ovious associated difficulties have been discussed here in HN for years; California is moving in with similar laws, so there is a trend, but it will take years for it to get anywhere. I'd guess that EU will make "GDPR v2" (however that will be called) with severe restrictions on tracking by 2025 or so.
That's the problem, in my opinion. Users should not be able to consent to third party tracking because if they can, companies will use any dark pattern at their disposal to make them consent. Third party tracking in general should be banned.
