6 ms·

The Activity one is a bit scary though. How many Android users are aware that Android tracks their app use and whatnot in this fashion? I think that's a point

by efdee 9y ago

The Activity one is a bit scary though. How many Android users are aware that Android tracks their app use and whatnot in this fashion? I think that's a point to take home. Users know that Google looks at their "location information". In their minds, it's to provide relevant weather info and whatnot. Seeing it aggregated in this way makes you realise that you actually are sending your entire life to Google servers.

HenryBemis 9y ago
Windows 10 do for Microsoft (sucking up and sending to M$ EVERY THING you do) what Android does for Google. Apple is a bit better (less-worse) on this. They do log many things in the background, and hopefully stopped (as they promised) to upload everything on every sync you do.
sametmax 9y ago
Every time I've shown people stuff like that, they shrugged: "so what ?". They. Don't. Care. That's the problem, right here. Not that entities are selling people's privacy. Bad guys have always been there, and will always be. But usually people want to act against them. In this situation people don't want to. We got a very sudden outrage out of sheer media amplification effect. It will fade. And they will go back to trading what's important to what's convenient.
- kodablah 9y ago
  I'm not sure it's a problem. People just have different opinions.
  - pksadiq 9y ago
    > People just have different opinions. Most of these people don't even know how the technology works. Enabling firewall makes them feel secure because it shows them a Green tick mark in a green circle. A file shred application is good to them (if they even care) because it shows an animation that feeds a file to a shredder and breaks them into pieces. They are never going to agree that they can be manipulated this way. Oh, and some people feel website x is secure because there is a green lock symbol in the URL bar. Some are more secure, because the green bar is a bit longer.
    - p1esk 9y ago
      I know “how the technology works”, and I don’t care. If anything, I think I might benefit in the future from availability of all that behavioral data they gathered on me, because one day a sufficiently advanced AI might analyze it and provide some insight into my personality.
    - kodablah 9y ago
      We just have to be careful thinking everyone is ignorant except us. Stating how some UI patterns are interpreted by some people doesn't mean anything. That some people are ignorant doesn't mean they all are. I'd like to think I'm not, and I don't see many of these "problems" as worthy of new legislation. Except when all other measures have been exhausted, we shouldn't be so quick to run to the legal system clutching our ban hammer with our perceived state of righteousness. Another problem I often see (not here, just saying in general) is how false equivalence is constantly brought up. Oh, so we should just let companies poison food or build insecure cars or whatever. I hope that with user data we can be more reasonable in how we legislate it and at least try to realize the unforeseen costs on the "good guys" vs the "bad guys".
  - sametmax 9y ago
    If people are in a burning building and half of them keep putting the content of the bar into the flames saying it pretty and fire can't harm us anyway, it's a problem.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > Every time I've shown people stuff like that, they shrugged: "so what ?" Some of this is genuine indifference to the problem, yes. But I think some of it is a lack of perspective. After years of sweating tech privacy issues, it's very easy for me to say "oh, they track app usage, which means they track app opening times, which means they can probably tell when you go to bed every night based on the last time you open Twitter." Or construct a hundred other scary (and accurate) stories about how this sort of data can be used to build whole-life profiles of people. Outside of tech, it's not so obvious. "They track which apps I open when, and said it's to help improve battery usage. What's the big deal?" And of course that's also true, this is useful data for innocent purposes like "predicting what you'll reopen next to expire that from memory last". But my concern is that there's an enormous gulf between showing people what's been collected, and how it's used. This article makes a bit of an effort, but it's still far short of the sort of example narrative that actually catches people's attention. Back during the Snowden stuff, there was a lot of talk about three-hop collection. And I think basically no one cared, because it's such an arcane description. But somebody made a tool (which, damn it all, I can no longer find) showing how location + call data at three hops could create a false-but-convincing narrative that someone was a terrorist. I showed that to a couple of family members, and suddenly they were way more concerned with the topic. It's not easy, I think this is a losing battle and I'm not sure how to change that, but I think people do care when they have useful context to work with.

by efdee 9y ago

HenryBemis 9y ago

Windows 10 do for Microsoft (sucking up and sending to M$ EVERY THING you do) what Android does for Google. Apple is a bit better (less-worse) on this. They do log many things in the background, and hopefully stopped (as they promised) to upload everything on every sync you do.

sametmax 9y ago

Every time I've shown people stuff like that, they shrugged: "so what ?". They. Don't. Care. That's the problem, right here. Not that entities are selling people's privacy. Bad guys have always been there, and will always be. But usually people want to act against them. In this situation people don't want to. We got a very sudden outrage out of sheer media amplification effect. It will fade. And they will go back to trading what's important to what's convenient.

kodablah 9y ago
I'm not sure it's a problem. People just have different opinions.
- pksadiq 9y ago
  > People just have different opinions. Most of these people don't even know how the technology works. Enabling firewall makes them feel secure because it shows them a Green tick mark in a green circle. A file shred application is good to them (if they even care) because it shows an animation that feeds a file to a shredder and breaks them into pieces. They are never going to agree that they can be manipulated this way. Oh, and some people feel website x is secure because there is a green lock symbol in the URL bar. Some are more secure, because the green bar is a bit longer.
  - p1esk 9y ago
    I know “how the technology works”, and I don’t care. If anything, I think I might benefit in the future from availability of all that behavioral data they gathered on me, because one day a sufficiently advanced AI might analyze it and provide some insight into my personality.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    We just have to be careful thinking everyone is ignorant except us. Stating how some UI patterns are interpreted by some people doesn't mean anything. That some people are ignorant doesn't mean they all are. I'd like to think I'm not, and I don't see many of these "problems" as worthy of new legislation. Except when all other measures have been exhausted, we shouldn't be so quick to run to the legal system clutching our ban hammer with our perceived state of righteousness. Another problem I often see (not here, just saying in general) is how false equivalence is constantly brought up. Oh, so we should just let companies poison food or build insecure cars or whatever. I hope that with user data we can be more reasonable in how we legislate it and at least try to realize the unforeseen costs on the "good guys" vs the "bad guys".
- sametmax 9y ago
  If people are in a burning building and half of them keep putting the content of the bar into the flames saying it pretty and fire can't harm us anyway, it's a problem.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Bartweiss 9y ago
> Every time I've shown people stuff like that, they shrugged: "so what ?" Some of this is genuine indifference to the problem, yes. But I think some of it is a lack of perspective. After years of sweating tech privacy issues, it's very easy for me to say "oh, they track app usage, which means they track app opening times, which means they can probably tell when you go to bed every night based on the last time you open Twitter." Or construct a hundred other scary (and accurate) stories about how this sort of data can be used to build whole-life profiles of people. Outside of tech, it's not so obvious. "They track which apps I open when, and said it's to help improve battery usage. What's the big deal?" And of course that's also true, this is useful data for innocent purposes like "predicting what you'll reopen next to expire that from memory last". But my concern is that there's an enormous gulf between showing people what's been collected, and how it's used. This article makes a bit of an effort, but it's still far short of the sort of example narrative that actually catches people's attention. Back during the Snowden stuff, there was a lot of talk about three-hop collection. And I think basically no one cared, because it's such an arcane description. But somebody made a tool (which, damn it all, I can no longer find) showing how location + call data at three hops could create a false-but-convincing narrative that someone was a terrorist. I showed that to a couple of family members, and suddenly they were way more concerned with the topic. It's not easy, I think this is a losing battle and I'm not sure how to change that, but I think people do care when they have useful context to work with.