Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day • Hacker News Board

Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day

#31

Post by davexunit » Mon, May 05, 2014, 1:32 PM UTC

sikhnerd wrote: post #7

Every time I see something like this come up, it really makes me wonder how many other apps out there are doing the same thing and getting away with it. Unless you root your phone and use something like the mentioned android firewall, or go whole-hog and install Cyanogenmod, what chance do you have to guard against this? I assume ios users are likely in the same boat, but with even less chance of recourse.

Proprietary applications spy on their users constantly. It's no surprise that Swype is making these location requests. Rooting your phone isn't an answer in itself. Rooting allows you to install a more free Android distro like Replicant or CyanogenMod. However, if you're still using proprietary applications then you haven't accomplished too much.

iOS users have no chance at all. There is no freedom in the iThings. Apple is in strict control over their users.

Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day

#32

Post by MasterScrat » Mon, May 05, 2014, 1:33 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #17

The official response is that location data is used for "regional dialects"... makes sense, but is IP geolocation not close enough? The screenshot there doesn't make it clear but is this coarse or fine location data? My keyboard, no matter how smart, shouldn't need to know where exactly it is on Earth to within a few meters. Within a state or town, fair enough.

The crucial point is: does it ever send the position to the Swype servers? If yes then it would be very suspicious on the part to receive thousands of requests per day per user.

If not, then ok it's terrible programming, but nothing worth getting paranoid about.

Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day

#33

Post by userbinator » Mon, May 05, 2014, 1:37 PM UTC

Frazzydee wrote: post #27

sikhnerd wrote: post #7

Every time I see something like this come up, it really makes me wonder how many other apps out there are doing the same thing and getting away with it. Unless you root your phone and use something like the mentioned android firewall, or go whole-hog and install Cyanogenmod, what chance do you have to guard against this? I assume ios users are likely in the same boat, but with even less chance of recourse.

Google seems to have no interest in protecting android users from this either. There was an app called 'App Ops' that gave android users the ability to choose which permissions they wanted to grant applications. No root required. Get too many notifications from an app, or don't need location functionality? You used to be able to turn these features off one-by-one for each app. You could also see the last time an app…

Why wouldn't Google want users to have such powerful control over their devices? It's always explained like this: Because it's "simpler." Because "things will break if the user does something wrong." Because "the average user won't need it."

Those same poor excuses have been responsible for so much loss of privacy and freedom elsewhere, not just by Google. To me, they're deliberately preventing users from having too much power to control their devices, so they can better persuade them in the direction they want. Then they accidentally gave the users too much, so of course they would say it wasn't intended, but the reaction certainly says that it's precisely what the users want...

Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day

#34

Post by ultramancool » Mon, May 05, 2014, 1:38 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #18

sikhnerd wrote: post #7

Every time I see something like this come up, it really makes me wonder how many other apps out there are doing the same thing and getting away with it. Unless you root your phone and use something like the mentioned android firewall, or go whole-hog and install Cyanogenmod, what chance do you have to guard against this? I assume ios users are likely in the same boat, but with even less chance of recourse.

The crazy thing about all these rooting methods is that the code is seldom open and in either case they always distribute binaries anyways. Rooting your phone is no guarantee of anything. Edit: think about how this would play out if you were to go on an Apple or Ubuntu forum and someone said "here, run this executable on your laptop to get extra functionality from it. I cannot give you the source because it's secret.…

Most (flagship) phones are rooted using an unlocked boot loader... in which case the "rooting methods" you're refering to is just a script to run a few commands to unlock the bootloader in fastboot mode, boot the phone into a temporary recovery system (which are by the way open source) and then use that to modify the OS. You can do it from a CLI yourself if you like. It's just time consuming. Most people just want the push button solution, yeah, maybe it's hacked together by some guy on a forum, but most of the solutions I've seen like that are just shell scripts in one form or another.

Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day

#35

Post by wcoenen » Mon, May 05, 2014, 1:40 PM UTC

bananas wrote: post #20

Just about everything I install on my phone is suspect these days with respect to privacy and permissions. Why does BBC weather need to write to my USB storage for example and why do I have to let it? The Nokia C2 I have floating around is starting to look interesting again. It has no idea where it is.

Every functional phone knows where it is, in the sense that it knows the signal strength of one or more nearby cell towers.

A java app on your Nokia C2 could probably determine its location like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11628648/how-to-find-use...

Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day

#36

Post by pille » Mon, May 05, 2014, 1:41 PM UTC

davexunit wrote: post #31

sikhnerd wrote: post #7

Every time I see something like this come up, it really makes me wonder how many other apps out there are doing the same thing and getting away with it. Unless you root your phone and use something like the mentioned android firewall, or go whole-hog and install Cyanogenmod, what chance do you have to guard against this? I assume ios users are likely in the same boat, but with even less chance of recourse.

Proprietary applications spy on their users constantly. It's no surprise that Swype is making these location requests. Rooting your phone isn't an answer in itself. Rooting allows you to install a more free Android distro like Replicant or CyanogenMod. However, if you're still using proprietary applications then you haven't accomplished too much. iOS users have no chance at all. There is no freedom in the iThings. Ap…

For this specific problem though, "settings" -> "privacy" -> "location services" allows you to turn off location tracking per app in iOS, or turn it off altogether.

Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day

#37

Post by davidgerard » Mon, May 05, 2014, 1:42 PM UTC

scep12 wrote: post #30

Frazzydee wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google seems to have no interest in protecting android users from this either. There was an app called 'App Ops' that gave android users the ability to choose which permissions they wanted to grant applications. No root required. Get too many notifications from an app, or don't need location functionality? You used to be able to turn these features off one-by-one for each app. You could also see the last time an app…

It was never released -- they removed access to a feature that was not intended for the public. That seems well within their right. For you to declare "Google seems to have no interest in protecting android users from this either." seems quite misguided, given that they are clearly working on a solution for this exact problem.

>given that they are clearly working on a solution for this exact problem.

Evidence?

Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day

#38

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 05, 2014, 1:43 PM UTC

Frazzydee wrote: post #27

sikhnerd wrote: post #7

Every time I see something like this come up, it really makes me wonder how many other apps out there are doing the same thing and getting away with it. Unless you root your phone and use something like the mentioned android firewall, or go whole-hog and install Cyanogenmod, what chance do you have to guard against this? I assume ios users are likely in the same boat, but with even less chance of recourse.

Google seems to have no interest in protecting android users from this either. There was an app called 'App Ops' that gave android users the ability to choose which permissions they wanted to grant applications. No root required. Get too many notifications from an app, or don't need location functionality? You used to be able to turn these features off one-by-one for each app. You could also see the last time an app…

[deleted]

Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day

#39

Post by threeseed » Mon, May 05, 2014, 1:43 PM UTC

sikhnerd wrote: post #7

Every time I see something like this come up, it really makes me wonder how many other apps out there are doing the same thing and getting away with it. Unless you root your phone and use something like the mentioned android firewall, or go whole-hog and install Cyanogenmod, what chance do you have to guard against this? I assume ios users are likely in the same boat, but with even less chance of recourse.

>I assume ios users are likely in the same boat, but with even less chance of recourse.

You assumed wrong. On iOS when an application requests access to your current location the OS shows the user a prompt. If a keyboard replacement app was requesting my location I would be asking serious questions about its intent.

iOS has a very well implemented permissions systems that I have no idea why Google hasn't copied yet. They really should.

Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day

#40

Post by DominikR » Mon, May 05, 2014, 1:43 PM UTC

Maybe this is caused by using Google Play Services to get the location.

The location tracking of Google Play Services is basically a black box, that tracks the users movement very accurately.

It could be that we don't see the count of location requests Swype made, but instead the count of location requests Google Play Services makes.