121–130 of 327 posts
My iPhone asks if I want to allow an app to access the Local Network. I assume that this 1) means that Apple does cover this situation and 2) my opinion that the phrasing "Apple allows applications to track user locations without authorization" is contemptible are both true.
My iPhone asks if I want to allow an app to access the Local Network. I assume that this 1) means that Apple does cover this situation and 2) my opinion that the phrasing "Apple allows applications to track user locations without authorization" is contemptible are both true.
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"Get a list of visible SSIDs" is exactly how phones derive your location. There's little distinction between seeing SSIDs and seeing GPS coordinates for 99.9% of the population.
Back in the real world SSIDs are a very coarse and not very reliable way of locating devices. You are exaggerating.
WiFi scanning is much less power intensive than GPS, much more reliable indoors, and often (in dense areas) more accurate even outdoors. iirc the iPhone only connects to “real” GPS in specific situations, such as when visible wifi signals are insufficient (e.g. highway driving).
[1]: https://www.appelsiini.net/2017/reverse-engineering-location...
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Does your employer have a donation matching program? It’s a great time of year to donate to the EFF.
It's so hard to prioritize non-profits these days. EFF is huge and super relevant, but so are aid programs to Ukraine or I/P, and reproductive health orgs. There's a lot going on I want to contribute to.
Edit: I can only find services marketed towards the nonprofit, not for the donor. A service that aggregated and automated all the nonprofits I want to regularly donate small amounts to would be great. I think it would be important to not require the nonprofits direct involvement in order to allow me to donate as diversely as I want.
Reading through the linked docs, this API seems to specifically be for apps created by owners of WiFi hotspots to help users connect to those hotspots ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkextension/h... ). > NEHotspotHelper allows your app to participate in the process of authenticating with hotspot networks, that is, Wi-Fi networks where the user must interact with the network to gain access to the wid…
Because the Chinese market is too important. For wechat you can maybe argue that it's a "super app" and probably also can be used to connect to wifi hotspots, but for alipay I fail to come up with an explanation..
My most blocked domain in nextDNS (which runs on all my devices) is metrics.icloud.com. books-analytics-events.apple.com is in the top 5 as well.
FYI, that API requires entitlements to be used, which are only available if you request them from Apple and justify their use. It's not a general-purpose API any app can use.
> that API requires entitlements to be used Lately I've witnessed a number of apps asking for Local Network permission ("Foo would like to find and connect to devices on your local network") when they have no business doing so in any possible way that I can think of.
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Why does apple get to decide which app gets automatic access to my private data, on my device, without needing to ask me?
Because this is how all operating systems work. If Microsoft wanted to give special apps access to your private data without asking, then that is exactly what would happen. The same thing is true in Linux, other than we'd expect that the open source nature would have users going "Yo, WTF"