iPhone apps harvest data when they send you notifications, researchers find
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Re: iPhone apps harvest data when they send you notifications, researchers find
#2"But all my friends are using $App, and ..."
"But $App is free, and it's so cool, and ..."
"Who cares? That's how the world works now."
Etc.
Re: iPhone apps harvest data when they send you notifications, researchers find
#3[deleted]
Re: iPhone apps harvest data when they send you notifications, researchers find
#4The article is absolutely all over the place.
The gist of it is that apps are allowed to run a bit of code when they receive a notification and they can use that bit of code to send some telemetry back to the mothership.
Re: iPhone apps harvest data when they send you notifications, researchers find
#5"But all my friends are using $App, and ..." "But $App is free, and it's so cool, and ..." "Who cares? That's how the world works now." Etc.
I know this is not how the comment is originally intended, but I am slowly starting to throw in the towel with regards to trying to convincing others. Best I can do is my immediate family. I don't even dream about my social circles anymore. I just want a relatively safe digital space for my family.
Re: iPhone apps harvest data when they send you notifications, researchers find
#6Not saying some companies aren’t up to no-good. But, collecting timezone (or ip to infer timezone), as long as it’s done with user consent in the privacy policy and or notifications setup process is actually helpful for end users. Most of us want (for example) our exercise reminder or our news update to arrive at breakfast even when we travel across Timezone boundaries. I don’t want to have to sign in to an app or go to a settings page for an app to tell it when I cross Timezone boundaries. If apps are collecting info to allow inferring Timezone without user consent then thats a different kettle of fish.
Not that I ever want linked in notifications, I definitely don’t want linked in notifications at 3am in the morning because I crossed a few international date lines.
Re: iPhone apps harvest data when they send you notifications, researchers find
#7How much information do app devs get when customers disable app notifications from their app entirely? Some apps (especially food delivery.. doordash, i'm looking at you) have such spammy notifications, I tend to disable notifications from the app entirely unless I'm actively using it (eg, an order is pending).
Re: iPhone apps harvest data when they send you notifications, researchers find
#8You'd think opting out of sharing analytics data with app developers would also cover push notification metrics but it doesn't seem to be that way from a quick look over the official docs.
https://developer.apple.com/notifications/push-notifications...
Re: iPhone apps harvest data when they send you notifications, researchers find
#9Yet another reason to deny notification rights to pretty much everything nonnative, and to restrict the native stuff.
I mean, first, they're disruptive. You don't need to know every time you get an email. Even on my laptop, I only get an email ding if it's from (a) a coworker (and it's a small company) or (b) my wife.
Second, the notification-spam ship has sailed. Apps behave TERRIBLY and abuse the privilege. DoorDash, for example, will spam you with ads using notifications if you turn it on. As a consequence, I just watch the app itself when food delivery is pending -- and so no notifications are required.
Re: iPhone apps harvest data when they send you notifications, researchers find
#10How much information do app devs get when customers disable app notifications from their app entirely? Some apps (especially food delivery.. doordash, i'm looking at you) have such spammy notifications, I tend to disable notifications from the app entirely unless I'm actively using it (eg, an order is pending).
My feature request for iOS:
Allow me to disable notifications from an app unless I have opened it within the last X hours.
I’d set it to a couple hours. My food apps could then tell me the order is ready, but can’t spam me with “Special Offers For You” days later.
Maybe I can do this with an automation?