Getting a bit creepy

http://blog.gingerlime.com/2013/getting-a-bit-creepy/

by gingerlime • 13 years ago

117 76 13 years ago

blog.gingerlime.com

qwerta• 13 years ago

I’m trusting you with my data. I realise there are risks involved, but please treat my data with respect. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. And don’t be a creep.

Yes, we can! :-)

Mister_Snuggles2• 13 years ago

I find that emails like that have the opposite effect and push me away from products/services. If the product/service was useful to me, those emails would not be required to keep me engaged.

ams61102• 13 years ago

Glad I'm not the only one who feels that way. My rules are simple:

1. Don't ever email me unless it's in response to a specific request initiated by me.

btilly• 13 years ago

That is how you remember it when they don't work. You don't even remember them doing it when they did work.

That's why companies run A/B tests rather than trust word of mouth.

Mister_Snuggles2• 13 years ago

That's very true.

Perhaps what turns me off are the desperate "Please come back to $SERVICE, you've been gone for more than 35 seconds! Please come back!!" from the free services. I don't mind the weekly specials from the local computer retailer, for example.

gvb• 13 years ago

I really like the "NoScript" model of permissions in a browser and wish phone OSes allowed that model. With "NoScript", I block javascript by default but can unblock temporarily or whitelist permanently.

On my Android phone:

* With standard Android, I have to whitelist an application when installing it. I cannot pick which permissions I give it, I cannot control when it can use those permissions, and I cannot remove permissions. Ever.

* With Cyanogenmod, I can restrict permissions fine grained both for permissions and applications. This would be really great if it were usable, but when I try to use it the applications behave very badly (often crashing) if they don't get unfettered permission to use my data.

I would love it if (a) applications behaved well in the absence of permissions (I fault Google for setting expectations of availability that don't require this) and (b) I had a UAC style permission granting mechanism[1] so that I control an application's access to my data and can monitor what it is asking for and when. While it could still "steal" my data (cache it, send it to the borg) any time I gave it permissions, it would at least give me a clue that the application was not trustworthy if (when) it popped up unexpected permission requests.

[1] I cannot believe I said I like Windows UAC dialogs. That will cost me another year in purgatory. :-/

Spittie• 13 years ago

I'd love to have it, integrated in the OS and by default as well. Something might be moving, as Google added "App Ops" [1] (hidden by default, but it's there) in Android 4.3, which allow you to revoke permissions from applications.

That said, there are some alternatives to Cyanogenmod's Incognito mode, which should work better.

One is XPrivacy [2], which relies on the XPosed Framework [3]. This is what I'm currently using on my Android phone. You can allow/restrict some permissions by default, and then have a whitelist for certain applications.

Another one is OpenPDroid [4], which requires you to patch your rom (there are some preset for the biggest roms, so usually it's just a matter of a few clicks). I haven't used it, but it should work just like XPrivacy.

XPrivacy and OpenPDroid send blank/fake data instead of blocking applications from using certain APIs, so they cause way less crashes. They even allow you to choose the fake data to provide, so that you can fake, for example, your location.

[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/07/25/app-ops-android-4-3s...

[2] https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacy

[3] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1574401

[4] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2098156

reginaldjcooper2• 13 years ago

Thank you for this, I am switching to Android for freedom but I wish to retain privacy also. Asking permissions for each aspect and requiring apps to work if it is denied is one of the few things I liked about iOS.

Mindless2112• 13 years ago

Something might be moving, as Google added "App Ops" [1] (hidden by default, but it's there) in Android 4.3, which allow you to revoke permissions from applications.

AppOps has been removed [1] in Android 4.4. Maybe it'll come back in a later version, but it's disappointing that it's no longer just hidden.

[1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Sett...

lesterbuck• 13 years ago

With standard Android, I have to whitelist an application when installing it. I cannot pick which permissions I give it, I cannot control when it can use those permissions, and I cannot remove permissions. Ever.

Fixed in Android 4.3. Now you can approve any permission at install and turn it off anytime later.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/07/25/app-ops-android-4-3s...

jellicle• 13 years ago

Well, no. You certainly can't do it at install, and even if there's a hidden setting that can only be invoked by installing a user-created app, changing the settings post-install is too late - your address book has been downloaded and stored permanently by the app maker.

What you describe may exist in a future version of Android but does not in 4.3.

alextingle3• 13 years ago

Now if only you could get it to fib to the app... Yes, you have permission to make phone calls - sorry there's no coverage right now. You have permission to view SMSs - sorry they never used SMS. You have permission to access the Internet - sorry, not connected.

masklinn• 13 years ago

* With standard Android, I have to whitelist an application when installing it. I cannot pick which permissions I give it, I cannot control when it can use those permissions, and I cannot remove permissions. Ever.

Interestingly, ios has added more and more permission toggles over time.

They're not very fine-grained[0], but they do allow toggling per-application access.

[0] which is kind-of a shame but avoids getting overwhelmed

sitharus• 13 years ago

Interestingly they've been adding permissions over time. Now you have to approve apps for location, contacts, calendar, reminders, photos, microphone, background data access and probably some other things I've forgotten.

Some of these are just new features, but others like microphone access have been added to old APIs.

Kiro• 13 years ago

Why are you using NoScript to begin with?

AJ007• 13 years ago

The stuff that the average Android app does is significantly more invasive than the things we called spyware and adware in the past decade.

SomeCallMeTim6• 13 years ago

(a) applications behaved well in the absence of permissions

As an app developer, I sympathize, but if you've got a reasonably complex app that requires 8 permissions, that's 255 permutations of code paths that you need to test (that you don't need to test right now) to make sure your app performs correctly. And that's not a reasonable request to make of an app developer.

Aside from that, some apps rely on, e.g., INTERNET permission to do their monetization. Aside: It's majorly not cool to "block ads" just because you don't like ads; pay for the ad-free version if you don't want to see ads. It's cheap in almost all cases. It's HARD to make money as an app developer; it may not be technically stealing to block ads, but it's ethically indistinguishable.

That said, as an app developer I would love to have the ability to request OPTIONAL permissions, or even better, request them at runtime (basically, let the OS bring up a "Do you want to let this app have PERMISSION_A, PERMISSION_B, and PERMISSION_C, to enable the following feature: FEATURE DESCRIPTION"). Again, though, I'd want to request a SUITE of permissions at once, so I don't have to worry about testing with random user-configured permutations of permissions.

There are some features I'd love to add, but they wouldn't be needed by everyone -- and I wouldn't want to scare people away from downloading my app, so I don't add them at all.

But I absolutely would still want guaranteed permissions: If my app needs Internet to make money, then I don't want someone to be able to use it if they're blocking Internet for the app, or otherwise blocking ads on the phone. You don't want the ads? You're free to use another app, or pay to turn the ads off.

jasomill• 13 years ago

Not really; this depends on how the OS developer implements denying various permissions. For example, your app already has to handle empty address books, location services reporting valid, fixed locations, and SMS messages not arriving; it also can't assume network and messaging services are available, even in the absence of permission problems.

But I absolutely would still want guaranteed permissions: If my app needs Internet to make money, then I don't want someone to be able to use it if they're blocking Internet for the app

How do you currently handle limited, filtered, or no Internet access for reasons other than lack of permission grants? Why can't you handle permission-based Internet blocking in the same way?

MaulingMonkey5• 13 years ago

As an app developer, I sympathize, but if you've got a reasonably complex app that requires 8 permissions, that's 255 permutations of code paths that you need to test (that you don't need to test right now) to make sure your app performs correctly. And that's not a reasonable request to make of an app developer.

Your average app already has significantly more than 255 permutations of code paths. While testing every permutation with e.g. automated tests is a great way to try and ensure full coverage, simply handling each once will often be sufficient: a significant number of these permissions, properly handled, will be orthogonal to the others.

Many disabled permissions aren't adding fundamental complexity: What's the functional difference to your code when it reads 0 contacts from my address book because I don't have any, vs when it reads 0 contacts from my address book because I disabled the permission? You already need to handle the former.

vikp• 13 years ago

I recently started making an Android application, and I wish that there was a way for it to ask for incremental permissions. Unfortunately, it is all or nothing (as far as I know).

The app is a happiness tracker that tries to correlate things with your happiness level. Right now, it's just location and some text/values you input. But what happens if some users want to correlate their texts with happiness? Or their pictures?

I don't want to have to ask everyone to grant my app access to major phone functions when only a small subset of users would want that functionality. Unfortunately, I have to because of the way the OS is setup.

alandarev• 13 years ago

I have strong faith in app developers and their quality participating in this discussion. But, most apps are done by immature developers, or worse, under minimal budget.

Now, considering only 1% of customers (I assume less) will be glad to have this feature, it will not be worth for developers to add extra complexity handling the permissions issues.

Ideally though, I would love having the same thing as you described. In reality, most customers are feeling OK even if the app requires root access.

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

But it just feels creepy to email me about it this way.

In other words:

"Yes, I know it's wrong and they should not know these things about me, but I want to use their product anyway, so can we please just pretend nobody knows what's going on in our society?"

fastball• 13 years ago

“You have SMS waiting from Dad, Jonathan and Florian”. The mightytext guys thought it would be more engaging to take a look into my recent SMS messages, pick up recent or popular contacts and use it to get me to use the product.
To me this is crossing some invisible but very clear line. I haven’t used the product yet, and it’s already trawling through my personal stuff?

I'm confused by this example. Isn't this exactly the purpose of MightyText, the app he installed? It's routing your text messages through you server. Obviously their system knows what texts you are sending, otherwise how would it function? Also, the product has been used if you give it permission to access your contacts.

gingerlime2• 13 years ago

I'm confused by this example. Isn't this exactly the purpose of MightyText, the app he installed?

Blog post author here. The purpose of MightyText (as far as I understand it anyway) is to allow me to use SMS through my computer at greater ease. I accept that in order to do that, technically I need to allow the app to access my Android SMS, contacts etc and "act on my behalf" to deliver messages.

I trust the program not to abuse this access I give it. I do not expect it to use this information to spy on me, even if this spying is merely for marketing purposes or to encourage me to use their program more. I think that's the creepy part.

santosha• 13 years ago

Is there a 'don't send me email about unread messages' option somewhere?

sciguy77• 13 years ago

I have to say I know exactly what the author means. When I visit a site (like BetaBrand) and all of a sudden start seeing their ads in my Facebook feed, it feels unsettling, even if they are just using the cookies temporarily stored on my computer.

300bps4• 13 years ago

That's Google Remarketing (http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/remarketing.html). The greatest sounding idea which has almost no chance of working in the real world in my opinion.

I went to Rackspace.com based on a HackerNews article a couple months ago and I'm still bombarded with ads for them on every site I go to.

Ruska• 13 years ago

almost no chance of working in the real world

Why do you think this? The company that I work for uses remarketing, and it actually works really well. I don't know the details behind it, but I know that it's a good source of leads (at least for my company).

Keep in mind that it might not work very well with you, but HN readers don't exactly represent the majority of web users.

disgruntledphd2• 13 years ago

Although its a similar approach, I suspect that what is actually being used here is Facebook Exchange, as I doubt Facebook would let Google remarket directly in their users newsfeed.

prostoalex• 13 years ago

Anecdotal evidence suggests it's a working strategy http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/ad-retargeter-adroll-we-qua...

tonyplee• 13 years ago

I switched to firefox with noscript. Stop using chrome 90% of times. Turn off 3rd party cookie on default for all browsers. pointed doubleclick.net/com to 127.0.0.1 to /etc/hosts.

The web felt less creepy now.

leephillips• 13 years ago

"it feels unsettling"

Why? If you have a Facebook feed, then haven't you already signed up to be spied on?

300bps4• 13 years ago

Unfortunately things aren't "getting" a bit creepy, they've been creepy for quite some time.

In 1998 I worked at a large publicly traded insurance company. We provided quotes online and sent a follow-up email to the person with their written quote in it. I was asked to figure out a way to determine when the person read their email. Our infrastructure was Classic ASP so I:

1. Created a new web site in IIS

2. Changed IIS' processing of .jpg to run through the ASP processor

3. Created a .jpg program in the site that would update a quote's record as having read the email

4. Put an img tag in the HTML email that loaded the "jpg" file with the unique identifier on a querystring

Our business people used this to automatically initiate an outbound call to the person the second they read the email. A lot of people were creeped out, "OMG I just sat down to read your email, what a weird coincidence" but by god those people bought insurance from us.

Of course today, that is the reason why images don't automatically load in emails. But there are plenty of people finding new creepy things to do every day.

alextingle3• 13 years ago

Another reason why reading e-mail in plain text is the only right way.

KC8ZKF• 13 years ago

How did that work in 1998? Wasn't the phone number in question being used to connect to the internet?

300bps4• 13 years ago

The vast majority of our traffic was done by people while they were at work. It was actually pretty funny how most of our traffic came in on Monday mornings and then went down from there and then the weekends were unbelievably dead.

Beyond that, 1998 wasn't exactly the dark ages. I knew plenty of people that had cable modems in 1996. I had an ISDN line myself in 1996 and a DSL line in either 1998 or 1999. There were plenty of options for people back then that didn't live in the middle of nowhere. And call waiting took care of letting calls through unless the person explicitly disabled it. Heck, any time I had dialup I had two or more phone lines and I had a cell phone since 1994.

But you're right - like all solutions it wasn't 100% perfect but it sure helped tremendously.

acdha2• 13 years ago

I had a cable modem by 1998. Faster uplink speed than I have now, actually – saturated the 10MBps network in my house and it wasn't throttled in the pre-Napster, pre-port-filtered era.

MichaelGG• 13 years ago

Why did you need to map .jpg to ASP ISAPI filter? Why not just call someimage.asp and set the mime type and use BinaryWrite?

BTW, great conversion technique. Certainly something to do nowadays too, if you can get them to load an image or click a link. I wonder, do average people load images in emails or click the links "if this email does not render correctly"?

300bps4• 13 years ago

I feared some mail programs might filter out non-standard file extensions loading from an img tag. Probably paranoid but it was so easy to run .jpg through the ISAPI filter of a single site that it seemed prudent to do that.

nni• 13 years ago

I've seen accurately targeted technical ads when viewing my local paper's site that are creepy as well, since there's "no way" they should have known enough to put that ad there, and was musing on a post about this creepiness, too. Recommendation engines are interesting, and it is amazing how much information can be gleaned from simple yes/no/didclick kind of stuff, but it can also reach a creepy point faster than we might think. Sort of like the little "20 questions" novelty toy that can surprise you, where (I assume) it exploits the effectiveness of dividing the solution space in half with each question... you do that 20 times and you've reduced the space by a factor of a million.

tyleraland• 13 years ago

My eye-opening creepy moment was after installing Facebook's android app. I had the G+ app already installed, but logged in with a dummy account which follows various people I don't know in real life. For some reason, G+ put those people in my contact list and one day I accidentally called one of them that put their phone number on G+. It never rang because I quickly hit disconnect. The next day on Facebook, guess who was suggested I add as a friend? Mystery dial.

rhizome• 13 years ago

Yeah, FB got permanently banished from my phone once I saw my contact list grow by a couple hundred people.

pnathan• 13 years ago

This is thr trade the author made: I sell my personal information away, in order to use a "free" product.

I suggest that if someone doesn't like this business model, then purchase your programs; don't get ad-supported programs.

IvyMike• 13 years ago

I prefer when sites and apps are in my face about what they can do.

Because the most likely alternative is they have the exact same information but the consumer isn't fully aware. Which is actually more creepy.

linux_devil• 13 years ago

As far as I remember , similar permissions are required when you install app for "Uber" cabs.

mathattack• 13 years ago

Getting our attention is a world of spam requires crossing the creepy line. Unfortunate.

Brakenshire2• 13 years ago

Personally, I'm going to move away from Android, because I feel like I cannot use the device without the sensation that my privacy is under assault, not only from some App creators, but from the OS itself. Many of the most popular utility apps ask for very intrusive permissions - unique identity, location, sms, contacts etc - and the OS provides no way to effectively sandbox your data. The OS does not believe that you should be able to control access to your data, on your own terms. I have also come to believe that there is a fundamental misalignment of incentives here - I'm only willing to use a smartphone on the basis that I'm buying a device which attempts to protect my privacy, not attempts to expose it, and that will only work if the business model of the manufacturer doesn't rely on mining my data to sell advertising.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure other operating systems are much better.

alextingle3• 13 years ago

CyanogenMod without any Google apps works pretty well. Wouldn't that meet your needs?

Brakenshire2• 13 years ago

That's definitely one of the options. I think, so far, it's CyanogenMod, Paranoid Android, Replicant, Sailfish OS or Firefox OS. My problem with the Android variants is that they're vulnerable to Google; if Google decided, for instance, to move really core functions into Play Services, they could make these variants unviable. Also, after-market OS's have never been popular, and you want to put your weight behind something which might actually be sold in shops, and stands a decent chance of gaining significant market share and momentum.

You're right, though, that I'm being a bit overdramatic, the options are definitely there.

bostik• 13 years ago

Many of the most popular utility apps ask for very intrusive permissions

At least that is getting rectified, little by little. Apparently 4.3 introduced a tool called "Apps Ops", which brings some of the fine-grained permission control seen in Symbian (where it was actually possible to select which permissions to grant) to Android. [1]

Once the power users learn to make most of this tool, the app developers will have no choice but to learn to cope with their apps getting too onerous permissions yanked from under their feet. Which, to me, is a very good thing indeed. It gives the developers one more avenue to compete in - make your app too nosy and you risk getting sidelined by an upstart clone that behaves better with user privacy.

[1] http://www.phonearena.com/news/A-hidden-Android-4.3-feature-...

grimboy• 13 years ago

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/android/mock/ is a neat way to stop applications asking for too many permissions getting what they want. It'd be nice if it were being maintained somewhere/possibly pulled into CyanogenMod.

madeofpalk• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, I'm not sure other operating systems are much better.

I think the funny part in all of this is that iOS does give you more fine-grain controls over app permissions.

tjoff• 13 years ago

Seeing how long it took them to realize that "Contacts" were something that you should ask permission to use I don't know if I'd trust apple with knowing which planet I live on.

whatevermatt• 13 years ago

What do we expect when we take free candy from strangers? Of course it's creepy.

This is just another reason to curate the things we let into our lives.

bits_of_freedom• 13 years ago

I'm experiencing a very creepy behavior on Twitter, described here

http://pastebin.com/KR01pmAH

(TL;DR: Twitter displays a different behavior with the user profile of my ex-girlfriend than with any user name, including people I've interacted with much more in the last 1.5 years)

I would like many people to do the experiment.

morgante• 13 years ago

Honestly, this actually sounds more like a bug than an instance of creepiness.

From my understanding, it sounds like MightyText scrapes in your SMS messages and allows you to read/respond to them from their client. Looks like it just picked up old messages and accidentally thought they were unread.

Otherwise, this isn't just run-of-the-mill tech company creepiness, it's fraud like the dating websites advertising "3 messages waiting for you."

Getting a bit creepy

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