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HN loves conspiracies. Everything everyone does is due to either a nasty moneymaking scheme or NSA.
Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day
21–30 of 168 posts
Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day
#22The 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.
sorry but you only need to do this ONCE
Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day
#23Just 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.
Yes, BBC Weather. That's it. They are part of this mega anti-privacy NSA conspiracy too!
Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day
#24[deleted]
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Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day
#25The 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.
I think this is poor user UI. I mean, in this day in age when so many people travel through different countries weekly on pleasure or business, their keyboard layout changes accordingly?
That doesn't make much sense.
Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day
#26The 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.
And someone in that thread replied that even with that feature disabled, they still get location requests.
Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day
#27Every 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 used location services. Android developers have a bad habit of requesting every permission under the sun, so I've gotten in the habit of disabling the permissions that don't add value for me.
Unfortunately, Google later removed this feature saying that its release was accidental. I thought it was a clean solution to a major problem.
Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/google-removes-vital-p...
Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day
#28[deleted]
Thread is reopened again, with the same issue.
Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day
#29Every 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…
What really disappoints me is the terrible placement Google uses for privacy features in the Play store. They're really hidden away instead of being prominent searchable fields. Microsoft of all companies does far better with their Windows Store.
Re: Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day
#30Every 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…
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.