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> People don't read the pages. People don't read the user agreements. Then maybe "people" shouldn't act completely outraged when they find out that their call history was uploaded?
No one chose anything. The best description I recently heard of these types push questions is "exploiting a bug in human behavior. And when the bug is in the brain, there is no patch."
So, this happened and we have confirmed about the dark patterns whether consented or not. What are good alternatives in this "Network effect" age? Facebook - I hardly use anymore. It exists undeleted because it serves as a kind of Social ID. I don't have the App installed anywhere, neither do I access it from my regular browser. The thing I'm struggling to get alternative for is WhatsApp. How could I talk to all my c…
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It is not "better than nothing," it is the minimum that is technically and legally required. The UI is intentionally deceptive. The text is deceptive. The big text says "Text anyone in your phone," which sounds great, but doesn't actually say anything about data sharing. The small low contrast text, describes what they're doing. They know that by putting it small and grey, most people wont read it. The buttons are de…
it appears to be a result of extensive A/B/C ... XY testing. In a way, the users themselves have chosen it.
The bit about minimizing bias means that you couldn't possibly give users the A/B variants to choose from but instead must assert the best you can that no user is exposed to different variants of the same experiment. You would typically do this by giving the client a cookie with a random seed which you can then hash with a secret and the id of the experiment to get a randomly distributed but sticky/consistent variant assignment that doesn't scale client storage with the number of experiments. Where things get more interesting is how to change behavior when a user logs into a new device. Do you switch to the users set of variant assignments or keep the experience on this device consistent?
This being said, yeah, I'm pretty sure this is the result of optimization on "what fraction of users give consent" while keeping an eye on uninstall rate as a health metric.
Source: Redesigned/rewrote A/B testing (and general optimization) framework for large e-commerce company many years ago.
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Also: Facebook works on every platform, while at Signal they have a strange cellphone fetish. I would love to use Signal, but I have to use Telegram. The Telegram desktop app is awesome, and it doesn't need a cellphone.
Signal has a desktop app nowadays and Telegram still requires a phone number to use. While Signal's QR code pairing method is more awkward than Telegram's SMS one, it also prevents your account from getting hacked remotely in Iran by stealing your SMS messages: https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/49976/intelligence/tele...
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Also: Facebook works on every platform, while at Signal they have a strange cellphone fetish. I would love to use Signal, but I have to use Telegram. The Telegram desktop app is awesome, and it doesn't need a cellphone.
WhatsApp didn't work on every platform. Not really . The web interface is just a remote control for your phone.
And this is pre-installed on the phone, with the same dark patterns that would push any non-privacy conscious person to activate it, even by mistake.
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> Much of this blame goes on Android and some on iOS/Apple. Which part of the blame goes on Apple?
Apple had zero permission management on the contact book, it was wide open. Especially FB and LinkedIn exploited that heavily and partly do to this day.
"Users can grant or deny access to contact data on a per-app basis. Any call to CNContactStore will block the app while the user is being asked to grant or deny access. Note that the user is prompted only the first time access is requested; any subsequent CNContactStore calls use the existing permissions."
Ok, well this is just great. So Facebook has all my contacts from their aquisition of WhatsApp and even though I've never used any of their Apps or had an account with them, I'm pretty sure everyone I typically communicate with has the App and did not opt-out of this collection. So they get data on me for free that the police would need a court order to get. This kind of data retention has been highly controversial i…
1. how well can this be actually used currently to create a proper psychosocial(?) profile of an individual? What's the current state of the art? Any suggestions for books or papers to read on the matter?
2. do we have any idea of how much our ability to do 1 will improve over time, given the same data? I often find it difficult to separate the Derren Brown style 'profiling' bullshit from what's actually possible. And I also keep reading that 'big data' is not quite as easy to use as it's often made out to.
3. how valuable does this 'stale' data remain? Personality is by definition supposed to remain stable, but I recall learning that even things like friendships, political/world views, other non-personality characteristics are relatively unchanging for most people after somewhere (early?) in their twenties. This could mean that even if Facebook does privacy 'properly', or somehow disappears, there's a rich dataset of individuals that, even if only in the future, be shockingly powerful to manipulate. And we're already scarily susceptible to manipulation using 'conventional' means.
I think we are talking differently about this permission concept. Legally yes, they had permission. But the fact that they used those dark ux patterns to request that permission should not be forgotten. Even though legally they are in the right, we as users should make this fact irrelevant and just abandon the platform. Let them be right, let them win the argument but lose the battle with the general public.
The problem is not that they took it. There are always bad actors. The problem is that very few people cared. So even if people start leaving facebook in mass, it will just start all over again with another bad actor.
unless they want to prevent this from happening in the long run?
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Apple had zero permission management on the contact book, it was wide open. Especially FB and LinkedIn exploited that heavily and partly do to this day.
Oh really? I didn't know that. Can you link me up with something about that? Thanks.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/02/path-...