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Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

privacyinternational.org

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Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#2
This is one of my concerns ever since the first app asked for my contacts.

You could be a mountain man and value your privacy.... but if you just know someone who uses tech you are exposed in any number of ways.

In the US things like third-party doctrine have not aged well in the information age as just communicating with people can expose you in ways you can't ever control.

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#3
This is kind of the same problem as people who have no FB account, keep all of their personal life off FB, then they go to a work or social group gathering and some blithely ignorant/clueless person tags their photo.\

One of the biggest sources of spam I have is non-technically-oriented persons who I know either professionally or personally, that have my name and email address in their address book, who click "yes" to everything on their ios and android devices. Some of these particularly less sophisticated individuals have probably had two dozen unique apps from random developers copy the entire contents of their address book.

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#5

That's not a privacy violation. Her data wasn't collected, a series of numbers was tagged. The person tagging the number could be entering the tag as anything they want.

According to your logic, If I create a website that maps Hacker News usernames to metadata, and because I know you in real life, I enter your information (name, occupation) on your behalf, and now the connection between your username and that other information is public, your privacy has not been violated, because this is not information about you, it is simply a series of letters connected to another series of letters.

I think what you mean to say is that it is not the app that committed the betrayal, it was the source who was enabled by an app that otherwise had a non-nefarious purpose. Which, fair point, but I don't think the article would disagree.

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#6
post #2

This is one of my concerns ever since the first app asked for my contacts. You could be a mountain man and value your privacy.... but if you just know someone who uses tech you are exposed in any number of ways. In the US things like third-party doctrine have not aged well in the information age as just communicating with people can expose you in ways you can't ever control.

>In the US things like third-party doctrine have not aged well in the information age as just communicating with people can expose you in ways you can't ever control.

agreed. it's by design and i don't think anyone will be allowed to escape it

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#8
This reminds me once again that the weakest link in the privacy chain today is the mobile phone number, especially since governments in many countries have forced people to link their number to a real ID. It's essentially become a ID number by proxy. However, in the case of the article, the reporter should know to inform her sources not to enter _any_ information linking to her real-world identity into their electronic devices.

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#9
The problem here is that once you give out a number then it's public in some sense. The person you give it to can pass it on, even inadvertently.

The smart thing to do is to have a public number and a private number. It makes no sense to call cabs with the same number you use to contact sources or whatever.

This is easily done with dual sim phones and can be taken much further with Google Voice or other dial-in phone number vendors. It's not very complicated and if your life depended on it you could easily assign a number per person.

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#10
post #9

The problem here is that once you give out a number then it's public in some sense. The person you give it to can pass it on, even inadvertently. The smart thing to do is to have a public number and a private number. It makes no sense to call cabs with the same number you use to contact sources or whatever. This is easily done with dual sim phones and can be taken much further with Google Voice or other dial-in phone…

> The smart thing to do is to have a public number and a private number.

What's the easiest way to do this?

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