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Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party

martinruenz.de

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Re: Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party

#221

Post by freshhawk »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #29
bostand wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google in 2007: Do no evil. Google in 2017: Skynet didn't build itself people! We need more ML training data!

Skynet v. 0.1 didn't build itself. Clearly, though, once it becomes a minimum viable product, it will produce the next generations of itself. Or will it? If it's an AI intent on approximating human speech processing, why should it be any good at programming? See also https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9658524/1/Branches-on-the-Tree-... .

That's a pretty interesting interpretation of the Terminator story and rules. I hadn't seen that one before, thanks for the link!

But ... ugh, rationalist fiction always makes me a little sad. I share the motivation, the annoyance at how pervasive the plot driven unrealistically stupid decision is in fiction. I want to like it, but it's always so saturated with authorial naivete, inexperience and smugness.

I guess I just wish they'd revere Iain M. Banks more and Yudkowsky less.

Re: Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party

#222

Post by NeutronBoy »

will_hughes wrote: post #199
NeutronBoy wrote: post #193

> This leaves me in an unpleasant spot as I, where I can, avoid using google services and now need to find an alternative dialling application. Isn’t this sweet? I am searching for a dialling application for my smartphone. A DIALLING application You bought a Google phone and don't want to use Google services, but complain that the dialler can be provided by a third party? Isn't that a good thing?

> You bought a Google phone Wileyfox make their own phones and Android rom. It's not really a Google phone (it may have Google Play Services, but that's different). The third party dialler app in this case was not provided by the ROM maker, but by a third party who gathers tracking data from usage of the dialler app. The ROM maker disabled/removed the stock dialler app from their ROM. If it was an opt in feature, the…

I understand. At the end of the article, he tries to make the point that having everything pluggable is a problem with Android devices. In reality, it's that flexibility that enables a manufacturer like Wileyfox to even release a unique product.

Re: Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party

#223

Post by derefr »

nkrisc wrote: post #12
sailingparrot wrote: post #3

Or that just means that we still call the device in our pocket a "phone" for legacy reasons. If we are okay with having a third party handles our messages, VoIP etc, why not the phone app?

I don't carry a phone in my pocket, I carry a personal computer that also makes voices calls over cellular networks.

I carry a small personal computer with a data-only cell-tower connection, that sometimes receives voice calls by talking to an SIP server over the Internet, which I pay for separately to my cell service. At this point, the "phone" is more the SIP app itself than the device it's on.

Re: Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party

#224

Post by wayn3 »

vacri wrote: post #217
wayn3 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't do that consciously (with an agenda). Infants are just being infants. If an AI just needs to keep doing AI things to "reprogram" itself, then theres no barrier for it to do that.

Infants also don't survive by themselves. Leave an infant alone and it will die.

im just saying that infants are learning a whole lot without consciously making an effort to do so. they just provide data through their sensors by existing.

Re: Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party

#225

Post by tomc1985 »

derefr wrote: post #220
tomc1985 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Normal muggles care for none of this conversation. If only because the same companies are training users to require all these extras, by effectively (and mostly inadvertently) erasing past knowledge. I'm sure Google would love it if their engineers could remove dialing entirely, what number could you possibly want to call that's not listed in Google somewhere? A lot of those same muggles were/are fine before these…

A lot of these people were fine before smartphones themselves came along. A lot of people were fine before phones. A lot of people were fine before agriculture or stone tools. Does that mean much?

It does when the replacements make life appreciably worse or more complicated, and it matters even more when the old ways are deprecated, made unfashionable, or just flat-out unavailable.

Look at John Deere.... we went from "software on tractors" to what is shaping up to look like a massive battle over intellectual property rights. Those new Deere tractors are superior in almost every appreciable way and yet we have another case of the OEM inserting themselves way too far into something that they do not belong in. Are farmers luddites for rejecting Deere's bullshit?

Re: Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party

#226

Post by derefr »

Houshalter wrote: post #201
i_cant_speel wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have loved to read the article but it's currently down.

The tl;dr is the manufacturer of OP's phone just used some random app as the dialer. The app was stealing all of OPs data and selling it to who knows who. They admit to doing this in the privacy policy of the app. But as it was installed by default, OP never agreed to it. And he had a lot of trouble removing it from his phone and finding a replacement. This is the problem with choice. All your choices are secretly ma…

Part of the requirement for the contract made by a sale of goods to be valid is a meeting of the minds: that both parties share the same concept of what is being transferred by each party to the other.

I would argue that, if you really want to talk about people "having a choice", you need a similar concept: that you are "free to choose" if-and-only-if your choices are indeed what you understand them to be. Which means some form of regulation or curation needs to happen to enforce that.

Of course, this doesn't have to be at all the same thing as the sort of "curation for quality" that the iOS App Store gets up to. Instead, more like FDA labelling requirements on drugs: list your active ingredients or get out.

Consider a hypothetical policy: "whatever misapprehensions a consumer has, due to your marketing, are your fault; a complaint about misapprehensions about your software that cites your own marketing, and which we ascertain as being valid, will result in a ban of all your apps from the store."

Can you make the "I Am Rich" app? Sure; it does what it says on the tin—proves you're rich with a $10k IAP. Can you make a Flashlight app that asks for your contact info? Nope; customers weren't expecting the app to ask. Banned. Even if you never send that info anywhere.

Re: Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party

#227

Post by raldi »

sailingparrot wrote: post #3

Or that just means that we still call the device in our pocket a "phone" for legacy reasons. If we are okay with having a third party handles our messages, VoIP etc, why not the phone app?

Paul Graham nailed it: If the iPad had come out before the iPhone, we'd all be calling them "tablets".

http://paulgraham.com/tablets.html

Re: Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party

#228

Post by derefr »

tomc1985 wrote: post #225
derefr wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of these people were fine before smartphones themselves came along. A lot of people were fine before phones. A lot of people were fine before agriculture or stone tools. Does that mean much?

It does when the replacements make life appreciably worse or more complicated, and it matters even more when the old ways are deprecated, made unfashionable, or just flat-out unavailable. Look at John Deere.... we went from "software on tractors" to what is shaping up to look like a massive battle over intellectual property rights. Those new Deere tractors are superior in almost every appreciable way and yet we have…

> the replacements make life ... more complicated

It's a long-held belief of mine that (what society considers) neurotypical people, enjoy making their lives more complicated. They pursue things that do so. (It's half the point of the societal encouragement to have kids the moment you get married: it keeps life challenging by adding complexity faster than the added stability of life-partnership can take complexity away.)

> Are farmers luddites for rejecting Deere's bullshit?

I'm not totally sure; don't know that much about this story. (Do you have a link? Maybe submit it as an article!)

My entirely-uninformed intuition is that agro-tech generally is such a different thing now than it was in the past, that legal precedents from the past won't serve us very well.

We don't just have fancier tractors now; we effectively have "a crop-growing+harvesting system in a box—just add ops staff." The modern large-scale farmer is now doing a job that bears less resemblance to the act of classical subsistence farming, than it does to the act of being a feudal lord with serfs. The serfs are robots made by John Deere. Does that give John Deere some different rights than they had when they just made tools for humans to operate? I'm not sure. I can be certain that it's not an "easy, obvious" question, though.

Re: Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party

#229

Post by PeterisP »

tomc1985 wrote: post #207
notatoad wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't require it, but Google makes it better. If you're just looking to make your life easier and not paranoid, there's no downside to having google in your dialer. and no, i'm pretty sure there's nothing "sacred" about your phone.

This is exactly the problem with technology. Asshole companies have to productify everything . It's not about being paranoid, it's about operational simplicity. Dialing a phone is dialing a phone; not everyone wants Google to think for them The act of punching in a number should not require any outside services or assistance or requirements. If there are value-added components to add then they can manifest as modular…

"Dialing" a phone is niche functionality that most people don't use anymore - generally, people don't know phone numbers anymore, they don't really see them, and they definitely don't use them, they just tap on a name or face in their contact list.

A phone number is an identifier that you use once when obtaining a contact (or it gets shared by someone, so you don't enter it even that one time). If a phone actually required you to dial a number, for many people it wouldn't be usable as a phone to call their friends.

This means that integration with wherever users have stored their contracts (and right not it's generally one of the cloud services) is a key component of the dialer app, possibly the main one - a contact app without phone features can be used to communicate with everyone (using the multitude of VOIP services available, skype calls or whatever) but a dialer without contacts isn't sufficient for communication.

Re: Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party

#230

Post by nebabyte »

tomc1985 wrote: post #203
notatoad wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't it be? Having google search directly in the dialer app is incredibly convenient - instead of searching for a phone number and then typing the number into your phone, you search for a business and call them directly.

Because you're dialing a phone. Nowhere does that require Google's involvement. The search feature should not be any more than an optional point of integration. Is nothing sacred anymore?

If you live in a world of "should be"s, it would be safest for you to assume that nothing was ever sacred, no. There were just opportunities being passed up or that weren't feasible until now.
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