61–70 of 176 posts
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Sounds like lawmakers need to enforce warnings labels on such products: „works only with sensitive data collection“ or similar.
I prefer the EU approach where the collection and use of personal data is regulated, not merely "be warned."
At least they acknowledged it, responded to the feedback and fixed it. Unfortunately I have a Sonos system which became effectively bricked unless I signed a new user agreement allowing the collection of data. There are no physical controls on Sonos so the system becomes useless without accepting. They used to sell dedicated controllers/remotes years ago but these were also bricked as part of an upgrade about a year…
Would a class-action be successful in a situation like this?
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Two problems with this assumption per the article: 1) the app previously worked fine without the location information 2) the app no longer works at all without location information. The only legitimate use case for location I can think of would be to pull down cable/tv/radio channel/station listings. But this shouldn't be a requirement since the user could easily manually enter in the ones they want. My guess is that…
The problem here is that they don't really want location, they just want a list of the surrounding Wifi networks, it just happens that such information is easily converted into a location, so Android requests that permission.
I think Google is the culprit here. Not just for wifi scanning, but also for Bluetooth, Google demands location permissions. In last 5 years or so, I have had a Garmin, a Fitbit and now a Garmin watch. I never used to have to enable location with my first Garmin tracker untill I upgraded Android os. After that point onward all my fitness trackers now ask to enable location in order to connect to my phone.
For good reason! There's many online services where you can put in a wifi MAC and pretty much know within 100M where someone is. Yeah, the message could be made clearer about what's actually being allowed, but in the end I'm glad it's there. Maybe a generic system for when you request a permission being able to provide an explanation string or something. I know some apps made a pop-up before the prompt but I found th…
Somewhat ironically because Google went and made that dataset, then publicized it.
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Hi! You might be interested to know that the Turn Touch homepage starts playing audio as soon as it is opened. This was enough for me to close it and never come back, and I think this sentiment is reasonably widespread. I'm genuinely curios about the reason some people decide to add audio (or video for that matter, but audio is way worse) on autoplay. Do you enjoy when web pages you visit do it? Did you see from some…
Yikes! It's part of a hidden video that shouldn't play until you explicitly open it. What's your browser/OS? I tested on Chrome, Safari, and FF on mac as well as iOS. I also just added a muted attribute to the `video` tag so it should no longer do that even if I messed up the JS for some browser somewhere. I encourage you to try it once again to confirm.
I'm not going to fight reading a bloody advert with an annoying "GIMMEE EMAIL" advert. That pattern needs to die in a fire.
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Yikes! It's part of a hidden video that shouldn't play until you explicitly open it. What's your browser/OS? I tested on Chrome, Safari, and FF on mac as well as iOS. I also just added a muted attribute to the `video` tag so it should no longer do that even if I messed up the JS for some browser somewhere. I encourage you to try it once again to confirm.
Not only that, but the fake popup made me NOPE out of the site. I'm not going to fight reading a bloody advert with an annoying "GIMMEE EMAIL" advert. That pattern needs to die in a fire.
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Two problems with this assumption per the article: 1) the app previously worked fine without the location information 2) the app no longer works at all without location information. The only legitimate use case for location I can think of would be to pull down cable/tv/radio channel/station listings. But this shouldn't be a requirement since the user could easily manually enter in the ones they want. My guess is that…
The problem here is that they don't really want location, they just want a list of the surrounding Wifi networks, it just happens that such information is easily converted into a location, so Android requests that permission.
Keep in mind that many things including trivial flashlight apps have a history of wanting location access. There's usually a pretext in the form of some questionable/marginal feature that's used as a justification for the permission. Often after some digging the real reason becomes apparent in the form of data collection or an included ad serving library.
For example, I have a 'smart' thermostat which has an app that requests location access. I deny it and it still works. There's at least one feature they use to justify requesting it but I suspect that if there weren't other uses (having nothing to do with benefiting me) for location data that the feature requiring location data probably wouldn't even exist.
> Google, in its wisdom, has tied "Location" into things like BLE Scanning and WiFi scanning. The excuse is that you can use these things as a proxy for location. That is, if I know you are near access point X your location is probably near Y. It’s not an “excuse”, it’s a fact. If you allow an app to scan SSIDs you are allowing it to know your location. No amount of sarcasm on the part of OP is going to change that.
Um, no, that's not correct. SSIDs aren't tied to geographic location. The mothership might infer location by looking at the list of SSIDs and checking it against a geotagged list compiled by a mapper, but that's a completely different thing that saying if you let an app look for an SSID you are allowing to it to know your location. You might as well say that by giving a camera the ability to know the time, you are al…
1. https://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-l...
2. https://xconomy.com/boston/2010/08/04/skyhook-wireless-digs-...
At least they acknowledged it, responded to the feedback and fixed it. Unfortunately I have a Sonos system which became effectively bricked unless I signed a new user agreement allowing the collection of data. There are no physical controls on Sonos so the system becomes useless without accepting. They used to sell dedicated controllers/remotes years ago but these were also bricked as part of an upgrade about a year…
I can't see how situations like this aren't anything but a bait and switch. You buy something, it changes out from under you.
Example: Dropbox's $99 plan used to be able to share a link with password protection, that's been conveniently moved to their $199 plan.
This simply can't happen with self hosted/controlled alternatives that you control updates to.