Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 478 posts

Re: Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook

#141

Post by h4waii »

wozmirek wrote: post #64
sergiosgc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I can clean up crapware, via adb, but on principle vote with my wallet. It's not acceptable to charge me something that rounds to a thousand euros and then fleece me for a few extra bucks. Right now, I restrict my selection to Android One [1] phones. The current one is a Nokia 8 Sirocco. [1] https://www.android.com/one/

What's your experience with Android One? First time I hear about it but I'm intrigued, doesn't it come from Google anyway? So the "secure" claims are kind of empty?

I think you mean privacy, not security, which there aren't really any claims about.

Google aims to provide security updates to all Android devices, but specifically targets their product lines (Nexus, Pixel, etc) and Android One devices as they have a little more control over the software.

Re: Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook

#142

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

isodude wrote: post #112
Yizahi wrote: post #21

Says the site with ~20-30 crapware JS trackers (12 blocked by uBlock, 23 by uMatrix). I'm not forgiving FB here, just pointing out that others are often similarly bad.

This is the reason I've stopped surfing the web and stay on news aggregate sites. It's madness how many dependencies sites have. Having Little Snitch on and not allowing general port 80/443 will make you perfectly aware.

I do all of my browsing through HN with reader view on by default. Have yet to see an ad, pop up or anything annoying. Gave up on desktop browsing entirely as some sites do not offer reader view.

Re: Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook

#143

Post by mtreis86 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #135
kowdermeister wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you use a blocker extension?

I trust ublock well enough, but it's a risk - Adblock Plus on the one hand basically started collecting advertising data and selling whitelisting to advertisers, and plugins generally have an evergreen auto-updating system. It's happened hundreds of times that a plugin was bought and malicious tracking, ad-injecting and/or cryptocurrency mining code was injected without the user being made aware or the party responsi…

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix is opensource and is basically a firewall built in a browser extension

Re: Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook

#144

Post by mariusmg »

AlexandrB wrote: post #116
LeonM wrote: post #20

It's not just FB, my Samsung S9 came preloaded with 'undeletable' Microsoft apps too. But this is nothing new, Samsung phones have came preloaded with bloat since forever. When buying a new phone I always spend some time deleting all Samsung, Microsoft, Facebook and carrier related apps. Yes, you can delete 'undeletable' apps through ADB, without rooting the device. pm uninstall -k --user 0

> It's not just FB, my Samsung S9 came preloaded with 'undeletable' Microsoft apps too. But this is nothing new, Samsung phones have came preloaded with bloat since forever. I'm old enough to remember when this was standard. Before smartphones almost all cellphones were bought through carriers and came pre-loaded with a bunch of carrier crapware (often unremovable). One of the best things about the first iPhone was t…

Windows Phones didn't had crap on them either. This is strictly a Android issue.

Re: Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook

#145

Post by lapnitnelav »

nojvek wrote: post #122

FaceBook is scammy on many levels. Their ads business always reports very inflated numbers. We spend $1000/mnth on FB ads. They show millions of impressions and 20k link clicks. However only 2k visits are shown by both google analytics and Mixpanel on the actual website. It really seems like an empire that will crumble some day.

Ah funny you mention that. Years ago I was doing tech support for a 3rd party ad management software mostly focused on Search (Google + Bing) but had also a FB part.

While digging into some discrepancy issues, I realised our own tracker was picking up way less clicks than what FB alleged. Across all the cases (a handful at best) I was involved in, this appeared over and over. I remember going back to our internal FB team highlighting that.

Never heard back from them and had too much on my plate to bother with it. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that picked up on that.

Re: Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook

#146

Post by anonu »

Yes - FB s*cks. But as a long time Android user - this is more disheartening from the perspective of my continued use of Android.

What Apple and the iPhone have demonstrated over the last few years is that they really care about their user's privacy and control over their apps.

This does not seem to be true for Google and Android.

Re: Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook

#147

Post by kowdermeister »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #135
kowdermeister wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you use a blocker extension?

I trust ublock well enough, but it's a risk - Adblock Plus on the one hand basically started collecting advertising data and selling whitelisting to advertisers, and plugins generally have an evergreen auto-updating system. It's happened hundreds of times that a plugin was bought and malicious tracking, ad-injecting and/or cryptocurrency mining code was injected without the user being made aware or the party responsi…

Everything can be compromised. Going outside of the building is a risk. In case of uBlock it would probably turn out pretty quickly if something fishy is going on. My point is that the benefits are greater for me than the risks.

You could actually roll your own uBlock extension: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

then write a script that updates it in your browser. Is that safe enough? :)

Re: Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook

#149

Post by lapnitnelav »

iamben wrote: post #136

I feel like Facebook is getting more and more desperate. There have been times I've loved it, but in the last year or two I've dialled back my usage to almost nothing. Now I get regular emails / (and when I log in a whole load of) red dot notifications - both things that used to be alerts about just _ME_ - that say things like "[friend name] just posted". With an undeletable app, I wonder how far away we are from som…

Yeah, I've had the same feeling the last 8 weeks or so, my phone is regularly spammed by FB's notifications about some random crap that is irrelevant to me.

I was discussing that with a friend and sure enough, within the minute, a FB notification about adding some random dude popped up.

Re: Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook

#150

Post by KingMachiavelli »

Bahamut wrote: post #132

While I like using FB, this is type of behavior by Android OEMs that largely drove me to the iPhone. The main reason I rooted my phone prior was to get rid of crappy apps I don't use from being on my screen. Around 4-5 years ago, Android phone manufacturers started locking down their phones more while not letting them be rooted. They didn't solve the problem of having undeleteable apps waste my time & space with clea…

It's the carriers that want the phones locked down so that they can have their bloatware installed and irremovable, Verizon in particular is the most notorious for mandating this. Additionally, among manufactures, Samsung wants to appeal to enterprise and gov environments and so also has their own suite of security features branded as KNOX and typically locked the bootloaders of the American/Snapdragon models.

The good news is that you can buy almost any Android phone off Amazon and with the exception of Samsung it is most likely bootloader unlockable. Motorola is especially good in this regard.

Post reply on HN