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Large-Scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers [pdf]
41–50 of 206 posts
Re: Large-Scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers [pdf]
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
An alternative would be to make it similar to the iOS photo gallery permissions: When an app requests permission to all photos the user gets the option to share only a subset of photos with the app. (This subset can be different for each app.)
While I agree with you, the current way this functionality works is really terrible.
It's indeed terrible in Apps that reimplement the photo selecting feature, but in simpler Apps that just use the default picker it works quite well and it is transparent.
Popular apps like WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, etc, could just fall back to the default picker when full access is not available.
Re: Large-Scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers [pdf]
#43I will criticize how Contacts are implemented on Android for this. For example, I don't want any person who I interact with once or twice a month to have access to my WhatsApp or any other social media app. But I can't do this in Android because once you add contact every damn app has access to that contact list. It's full access or no access if app uses permissions. I need something where I can label contacts to not…
That is not correct.
In Android you have two ways of accessing most things: full access or use the system to access one entry.
You should blame WhatsApp for not supporting the second method.
Re: Large-Scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers [pdf]
#44I will criticize how Contacts are implemented on Android for this. For example, I don't want any person who I interact with once or twice a month to have access to my WhatsApp or any other social media app. But I can't do this in Android because once you add contact every damn app has access to that contact list. It's full access or no access if app uses permissions. I need something where I can label contacts to not…
ideally true. The issue is common person expects things to 'Just Work' - means read/allow contacts.
Re: Large-Scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers [pdf]
#45It didn't take long after the first social graph was created to realize that your contacts define you as much or even more than your other indicators do. That's why so many companies are gunning for this information.
Re: Large-Scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers [pdf]
#46I was wondering, what would happen, if I would add all the phone numbers from the Facebook leak to my contacts. Did anybody try something like this? What is the upper contact limit?
Re: Large-Scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers [pdf]
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn’t login on Wire for 3 months and “for my security” messages that were sent to me during that time were just... lost. I think my history was deleted too. This happened 2 or 3 years ago, but it made me just switch to something else (Telegram).
So you want them to just hold on to your messages on their servers indefinitely? I realize this is the norm nowadays, but is this really what you actually want?
[deleted]
Re: Large-Scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers [pdf]
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
on ios if one does not grant addressbook permission for the app: * telegram uses an "internal" contact list for which one can add contacts via the desktop client and then works as expected. * whatsapp let's the user freely initiate contact by phone numbers, but then only shows the number (no name). don't know about signal.
As far as I can tell, on Android, whatsapp requires adding a person to your contacts before you can message them at all. I find this very annoying when I'm going to be messaging someone for a brief period only. If there's a way to not do this, I'd like to know it.
You can message a person without adding them to your contacts, if you know their phone number.
https://wa.me/their-phone-number-in-international-format . Type this link in the browser or in some chat. Long press, click open and it will open in whatsapp by default.
You can start a chat with yourself in whatsapp, to send these links to yourself and easily click on them. (type wa.me/your-phone-number-in-international-format , click and send any message )
Re: Large-Scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers [pdf]
#49The reason this abuse of privacy is so widespread is because there are no bad consequences for the perpetrators.
Governments don't enforce privacy acts in this circumstance.
Users just roll their eyes, knowing there is no way for them to complain except though boycotts, which are difficult to organise and might not work unless coordinated on a massive scale which has never been tried.
And so it goes.
Re: Large-Scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers [pdf]
#50Happened with Australia's real time payment system too. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/monitoring-fail-allowed-westp...
I didn't know that. Thanks.
I suppose the consequences for Westpac are... nothing.