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Apple tells app developers to disclose or remove screen recording code

• umvi 8y ago
  Click-baity title. Should say "Apple tells app developers to disclose or remove screen recording code" which is much more reasonable than a heavy-handed forced action.
  • evv 8y ago
    The article mentions that Apple forced a developer by threatening to take away app store distribution: > Apple gave the developer less than a day to remove the code and resubmit their app or the app would be removed from the app store, the email said.
    • criddell 8y ago
      I'm sure the developer was happy to get some time, but as a user I would rather see any app that's violating the agreement removed immediately.
• minimaxir 8y ago
  > “Your app uses analytics software to collect and send user or device data to a third party without the user’s consent. Apps must request explicit user consent and provide a clear visual indication when recording, logging, or otherwise making a record of user activity,” Every big app collects analytics without such disclosure (and definitely no visual indicator). I honestly can't think of a counterexample. If Apple's declaration is taken literally, this will have massive fallout on the analytics ecosystem.
  • threeseed 8y ago
    Not every big app. Every app. It can often be difficult to determine root cause of an issue when you are just given a stack trace. I suspect we will soon see two patterns arise: (1) Popups when the app launches to get consent and (2) Screen recording that still happens but only phones home if an exception occurs and where they get consent at that point. And what does this mean for core metrics like Google Analytics ?
    • mcny 8y ago
      I sincerely doubt Google would send ANYTHING to a third party unless it really had to. That being said I think this is a good compromise and I hope Apple applies this to all vendors. I think the biggest winner here if I read this correctly is AWS and other cloud providers. The most straightforward way for someone like mouseflow to comply is to separate each customer to its own instance in a way that mouseflow has no access to user data.
      • glitchc 8y ago
        Huh? Google’s entire revenue model is based on advertising. Of course they send your info to a “third-party,” that party being the advertiser(s).
        • ForHackernews 8y ago
          Googlers will insist that they don't "send" your info to the advertisers, they only let advertisers buy ads based on that info.
          • cosmie 8y ago
            I'm a non-Googler who has spent a lot of time around media analytics, and I'll make the same insistence that that is a true and important statement. Google is a one way mirror. They will suck in as much data as you want to give them about people, but it's virtually impossible to pry any info out of Google that's at an individual and identifiable level. Only aggregated performance information is exposed to advertisers, and the ability to mix and match targeting criteria based off of those dimensions that they expose. Even with their enterprise marketing products like DoubleClick you can't pry out individual-level data. DoubleClick customers used to be able to export an anonymous ID, so they could use independent third-parties to consolidate conversion and impression data and measure attribution across complex marketing campaigns. But even that isn't possible anymore, due to GDPR concerns[1]. The closest they now get to "sharing" user data is Ads Data Hub[2]. And by sharing, I mean they expect you to share all of your data from outside of Google, which Google will then connect to their data and allow you the privilege of running aggregated queries. But they actually keep their side of the data firewalled off, and it's not human readable or accessible at the row level, only in rollup queries. In the ad world, I can assure you they are far more protective of user data than most anyone else. The size, effectiveness, and dominance of their marketing channels afford them the ability to take that position without it materially impacting advertiser spending. Very few advertisers take such active measures to insulate exposure of user data from advertisers. And for many that do invest resources in such endeavors, it doesn't mean that they don't provide user data to advertisers. It just means that they don't provide it for free anymore. [1] https://adage.com/article/digital/google-s-move-remove-doubleclick-id-presents-issues/313415/ https://adage.com/article/digital/google-s-move-remove-doubl... [2] https://developers.google.com/ads-data-hub/ https://developers.google.com/ads-data-hub/
  • h3throw 8y ago
    You didn't pay attention to the key part "to a third party". Most of the larger companies don't use third party logging software, AFAIK.
    • briandear 8y ago
      The first party already has your data under their own privacy policy. But users aren’t necessarily agreeing to the privacy policies of third parties when they use an app.
    • guelo 8y ago
      That's not true. Most companies offload analytics to a third party such as Google Analytics or Mixpanel.
      • jug 8y ago
        Ohh, I wonder if this is related to why Apple is doing this. It benefits the end user but also punishes app developers who rely on Google.
        • saagarjha 8y ago
          > It benefits the end user There's your reason.
          • LeoNatan25 8y ago
            How funny that "benefits end user" and "punishes ... Google" are in the same sentence in such a nonchalant way.
        • jayd16 8y ago
          Dropping all analytics and crash reporting hurts the product and by extension the user.
          • saagarjha 8y ago
  • guelo 8y ago
    Yea Apple needs to clarify what is allowed and what is not. Keeping track of user clicks is pretty much industry standard.
    • Pharmakon 8y ago
      I believe Apple just used their weight to declare that industry standard is, as we already know, anti-customer and anti-privacy. I suspect they’ve realized that beyond the iPhone and iPad, their biggest advantage is that they have history of respecting user privacy. Leaning into that when companies like Google literally can’t because spying on people is the core business model, is pretty smart.
    • glitchc 8y ago
      I’ve seen them in action, these frameworks do way more. They record touches, delays between touches, sensor info, key logs, including mistypes. Watching the playback of the collected data against the backdrop of the app is like watching a remote desktop session.
    • saagarjha 8y ago
      > Yea Apple needs to clarify what is allowed and what is not. Apple explicitly does not do this, because they know that they'll draw a line and two months later someone will try to get through on a technicality.
  • avip 8y ago
    And likewise big chunk of cybersecurity.
  • duskwuff 8y ago
    There is a pretty significant difference between recording users' activities at an abstract, aggregate level (e.g, to measure DAU and user retention, or to track how many users use a feature or complete a funnel), and recording the activities of individual users at the highly specific level used by Glassbox. I suspect that Apple's statement is meant to target the latter, not all analytics as a whole.
    • minimaxir 8y ago
      I agree, which is why the exact verbiage on Apple's end is important.
    • tyingq 8y ago
      There's a fair number of vendors that "record" web sessions too. Not via a screenshot, but the difference isn't much to a lay person. They track mouse movements, key up/down, etc. Enough to credibly recreate a "video" of sorts. Apple would have a harder time banning that.
      • thekyle 8y ago
        > Apple would have a harder time banning that. Well, obviously Apple cannot ban what is outside of its walled garden.
        • tyingq 8y ago
          I'm not sure about that. They certainly control which browser apis they choose to support. And it seems like those that support web applications getting closer to native apps functionality are the ones they lag on.
  • AlexandrB 8y ago
    > If Apple's declaration is taken literally, this will have massive fallout on the analytics ecosystem. Good. I don't know when it became OK to log just about everything a user does in your app (or operating system, in the case of Windows 10) "just in case". It's creepy, often unnecessary, and prioritizes the convenience of the developer over the user's right to privacy.
    • jabberthemutt 8y ago
      Especially since software UX has not become significantly better as a result.
      • rocqua 8y ago
        I wonder whether UX monetization has or whether the analytics haven't had any effect at all.
      • toper-centage 8y ago
        Exactly. Only "conversion".
  • woshea901 8y ago
    We got a 24 hour mandate to upload a tracking free version. Fuck you Apple. "Your lack of preparedness is not my emergency." My European dev team is now up at almost 1am on Saturday putting in a fix for this. Unless Apple themselves is going to provide tools to help make better, crash-free software, these are necessary third party tools.
• byron_fast 8y ago
  I guess they could have made that impossible to begin with. But, you know, reasons.
  • favorited 8y ago
    That's really not possible. It would be pretty trivial for an app to to capture screenshots by drawing their own main window into a bitmap and composite those screenshots into a video. iOS has system frameworks to make both drawing and video composition easy.
    • byron_fast 8y ago
      It is possible. They specifically make it possible for bad actors.
      • favorited 8y ago
        How? (1) Views can draw into bitmap contexts. (2) Those can be used to create images. (3) Then you make a video and add each image as a frame. Which one of those 3 simple things should be disabled? Because I use all 3 independently in an app I work on... If you have those 3 ingredients, you can make a screen recording.
        • byron_fast 8y ago
          Yep, you are correct. If you output to an output device, it can be used for bad. The question is how hard can you make it at that point - to show that only the marketeers are using it.
        • baroffoos 8y ago
          This is one of those things that needs to be dealt with by legal action. You can't make most kinds of apps without also making it possible to record the screen but you can make recording the screen illegal until the user accepts and require that the user can deny it and continue to use the app.
  • 8y ago
• aaaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  Oh no, how will we track user engagement now? I need those engagement numbers for my promotion case by May, thanks Apple! >:( On a more serious note: it’s nice to see that Apple is finally cracking down on these shady analytics SDKs. I’m this close to forgiving the headphone jack thing...
  • glitchc 8y ago
    I, too, am thrilled with this development. Feel happy for supporting Apple, bought an iphone after years of Android because of their vocal and increasingly militant stance on privacy. Let’s ban the entire Google analytics framework while we’re at it, including in Safari. Then we’re getting somewhere.
  • ambicapter 8y ago
    Server-side analytics, probably.
• ProAm 8y ago
  Why doesnt the Apple app review team catch this prior to deployment? I thought that was the big thing about having to use the app store was Apple kept it locked down tight to prevent this from happening?
  • cabaalis 8y ago
    I don't want to disparage that team as I'm sure they work very hard and do an excellent job. But my overall opinion of that process having it gone through it multiple times is that it's (a) security theater and (b) only exists to create the illusion of excellent curation. I hear all the time about different rules being applied to apps retroactively.
    • eridius 8y ago
      It's definitely not security theater. But it's also not perfect, and they can only catch the things they actually look for.
      • saagarjha 8y ago
        Unfortunately, it's often the case that they're not looking for the right things or not looking very closely at all…
  • 0x0 8y ago
    Because the app review team only evaluates a compiled binary, it is fairly easy to obfuscate nefarious activity. It could be as simple as serving different javascript from your backend to a [JSContext evaluateScript] call based on a flag you set after the app is approved, for example.
    • eridius 8y ago
      Of course, serving up javascript from your backend to a [JSContext evaluateScript] call is itself a violation of the app store guidelines. Interpreted code not executed as part of a web page rendered by WebKit either has to be bundled in the app itself, manually entered by the user, or has to be in the context of a learning app with a slew of restrictions around the UI (basically, the exception for Swift Playgrounds).
• heywire 8y ago
  I think many people would be surprised by the amount of analytics data leaving their phone _all the time_. I recently was doing some work where I had my iPhone proxied through mitmproxy on my laptop, and was blown away by just how much data was being sent. Some apps were sending a request to one or more analytics firms every single time I touched a UI control. I would set up a pi-hole and VPN to block this stuff, but I'm sure the app developers will just start tunneling the requests through their own hosts. Maybe some day one of these open source phones will actually be viable.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • baroffoos 8y ago
    I should take a look at mine and see what its like. I have a degoogled android phone with fdroid so I don't expect it would be too bad. Is there any way to do it so you see the data before encryption?
    • emptysea 8y ago
      If the app doesn’t pin a cert then mitmproxy should allow you to decrypt the data
      • heywire 8y ago
        Exactly this. Mitmproxy makes it very simple to download and install the root certificate on your device. Just don’t forget to remove or disable it when you’re done.
    • davb 8y ago
      I done this recently and almost every app was using certificate pinning, so seeing the actual data was difficult. My sokution in the end was to setup a tiny vm with dnsmasq setup to forward all requests and log then as it does so, then just tail the log. There was remarkably little caching going on in the device so almost every actual trigger a DNS query. Alternatively setup Pi-Hole for testing. Microsoft Edge (on Android) was the worst offender, contacting vortex.data.microsoft.com almost constantly, on almost every UI action I made. Other notable were the amount of apps contacting analytics servers in the background, when the app as (from an end user perspective) not even running.
• have_faith 8y ago
  I think we are approaching a transitionary period where lines by various companies are starting to be drawn in the sand with regards to privacy and user hostile design choices. It's still a little blury, but as the lines become clearer users will start to shift. And either by choice or regulation the lines will be drawn. Apple's hand is being forced in some cases, but usually in a direction they are already heading. Google will find the balance much harder due to the nature of their revenue model.
  • Despegar 8y ago
    Yes things are starting to swing towards privacy. We have GDPR, Facebook's constant fuck ups, and Apple publicly dunking on the ad-tech industry to thank for that.
    • rocqua 8y ago
      Recently someone on HN mentioned off-hand that changes to the chrome extension model are coming. Specifically, these changes would break ad-blockers as they currently work. Point being, there is some movement against this.
  • ppeetteerr 8y ago
    Apple is following up on their own promise to be a privacy-first company. That's their game now and they are playing it respectably. First, they removed Facebook from Internet Accounts in settings, then they blocked Facebook's enterprise certificate and now this. Remember that Apple was one of the first to send an anonymous MAC address to Wifi hotspots so that advertisers could not track a user in real space.
    • wtmt 8y ago
      > First, they removed Facebook from Internet Accounts in settings, then they blocked Facebook's enterprise certificate and now this. Just to make it clearer, the removal of Facebook in the accounts was not about Facebook alone (though it may have been the cause for the decision). Integrations with Twitter, Vimeo, etc., were also removed together. Facebook’s enterprise certificate was revoked because it violated Apple’s policy by using it to distribute applications to users who’re not “internal” and not employees/contractors. That the app in question was also sleazy (as Facebook usually seems to be) was a coincidence in this case. But it’s also true that that app wouldn’t have passed the App Store review process had it been submitted there.
• duxup 8y ago
  I think this needs to be clarified more. At the same time as appreciative I am about Apple's privacy stance, it really worries me that they're the only large company that seems to care.... and when they don't, who will?
• guessmyname 8y ago
  I appreciate and welcome this requirement from Apple. Some time ago I built something I call “Network Blackhole”. The project intercepts HTTP traffic from applications that I installed in either my MacBook or iPhone. An excellent example of this is Crashlytics [1], Segment [2], and Sentry [3], which are among a list of popular web services that many developers use to report bugs and crashes in their software, and the famous Google Analytics, which I hope I don’t need to explain what it is used for. With the help of Little Snitch [4] a popular network monitor for macOS, I detect when an app tries to connect to one of these services, or similar. Then I execute a tool written in Go like so: “blackhole example.com” which does the following: 1. Inserts domain into /etc/hosts 2. Create an HTTP web server (in Go) 3. Adds a match-all endpoint to the server 4. Creates an SSL certificate with mkcert [5] 5. Creates an Nginx virtual-host for the server 6. ??? 7. Profit In the end, and after 1-2 minutes, I have all the traffic to that domain gracefully redirected to a black hole, reducing the amount of data that I leak to 3rd-party websites. However, don’t get me wrong, I understand the purpose of these services, I haven’t said they are evil or anything like that. I would probably use them myself if I had to, but I certainly would add an alert to ask for explicit consent from the user to send this information to a service that I won’t even have control over. If one of them leaks my customer’s data, I will be the only one facing the consequences. I hope I don’t have to add another domain to my network black hole anymore. [1] https://crashlytics.com/ https://crashlytics.com/ [2] https://segment.com/ https://segment.com/ [3] https://sentry.io/ https://sentry.io/ [4] https://help.obdev.at/littlesnitch/ https://help.obdev.at/littlesnitch/ [5] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert
  • dmacedo 8y ago
    You have two links labelled [4], and also didn't share your tool; which was the more interesting content of your comment ;)
    • guessmyname 8y ago
      Thank you, I add the missing link. Unfortunately, I cannot share the tool because it contains multiple zero-days for apps that make use of Paddle [1] and Devmate [2] to grant and validate software licenses. It also contains zero-days for apps developed in partnership with Panic [3] and MacPaw [4]. I’ve been in contact with some of the developers of these apps to patch their software, and until they all release security updates I cannot share the code with the world. [1] https://paddle.com/ https://paddle.com/ [2] https://devmate.com/ https://devmate.com/ [3] https://panic.com/ https://panic.com/ [4] https://macpaw.com/ https://macpaw.com/
• driverdan 8y ago
  This is one of the reasons why I won't own a computer I can't root. On my Android phone I'm running AdAway which blackholes ad and tracking hostnames. This is currently impossible on iOS without using your own external DNS server.
  • chillacy 8y ago
    I suspect companies will move to owning their own endpoints and having the info forwarded to google/mixpanel on the backend. Though to be honest I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet.
• endofcapital 8y ago
  This is a thing? What?
• ascar 8y ago
  I wonder if this move is related to this recent story [1] from theappanalyst, which reveals not just a privacy, but also a security nightmare. The article even seems to mention it "Even though sensitive data is supposed to be masked, some data — like passport numbers and credit card numbers — was leaking." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19102036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19102036
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    It's almost certainly a response to that.
    • ascar 8y ago
      It just seems to be really fast. The article appeared on HN 21 hours ago. Unfortunately there is no date on the blog post itself. When I read the report I was hoping that it will have serious consequences for Glassbox and similar services. Good that Apple is taking action so fast. I hope Google kicks in soon too.
      • saagarjha 8y ago
        I think there was some associated press coverage for the last couple of days, of which that article was on the tail end of.
    • gorkemcetin 8y ago
      There were very similar news that have made to Techcrunch, so this is not anything new. So it cannot be a response to this - Apple has been working on it for some time.
• fipple 8y ago
  I see this more of a perf thing than a privacy thing. Since most apps connect to a remote backend, any app developer can create backend tooling that perfectly recreates a user session from server logs, with local actions logged locally and uploaded on the next request. But they’re usually too lazy to, and waste my bandwidth by uploading logs directly from my phone to a third party.
• TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  > explicit user consent Is this possible? Opinion: Explicit consent can only be given if a person fully understands what they're agreeing to. The weight of evidence suggests that once personal identifying information is out in the wild it can't be retracted. While the banks, police, and media continue to refer to such a concept as identity theft, I don't believe it's possible for anyone to give explicit consent to their data being leaked and used by people with ill-will. Edit: leaked, or intentionally sold to bad actors. Or the parties collecting the data in the first place are bad actors themselves.
• pablo-massa 8y ago
  And when browsers will protect users against activity recording without consent? For example Hotjar [1], I did a review [2] of the product a year ago and I could not believe the creepy surveillance level of this tool. For me, manually disable JS or install content blockers will not get mainstream appeal for the regular users who just want to browse the web (and didn't know that maybe are being recorded). This should be blocked by default on every browser. [1] https://hotjar.com https://hotjar.com [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDgybTvnhjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDgybTvnhjY
  • randormie 8y ago
    It's creepy indeed. Not only do they collect all your actions (key presses included) but I believe they also send the activity to their servers via HTTP, rendering the SSL on the page that includes their script, useless.
    • CraftThatBlock 8y ago
      If it's a HTTPS page, wouldn't that be blocked due to mixed content though? Or is HTTP requests from a HTTPS-loaded script allowed?
      • djsumdog 8y ago
        Modern browsers should block all backend/javascript http communication if the main request is made over HTTPS, unless you specifically disable it with a Content Security Policies.
        • inetknght 8y ago
          Better to just disable javascript altogether. Sure, there's no dynamic loading of garbage, but I didn't want that anyway. If your back-end server can't render HTML then you need to build an app. At least with native desktop apps I can put that garbage into a VM or container. Load whatever you want. I can then apply my own firewall/containerization/VM rules.
    • 8y ago
• buremba 8y ago
  ..and many analytics startups die in one night.
• kccqzy 8y ago
  But what about these "recordings" in a web app that Apple has no control over? As far as I can tell, grabbing a screenshot of a canvas element and sending it to a server is still doable without being reprimanded by Apple.
• sephoric 8y ago
  I specifically put a disclaimer on my website (sephware.com) that my apps don't even collect, let alone sell, any of your data. Ironically my app (Autumn) was rejected and not allowed on the App Store, even when I filed an appeal, because it uses Accessibility, despite there being a good handful of apps of the same type on the App Store that were grandfathered in before that rule, many of them long abandoned and receiving recent poor reviews with the users asking for them to be updated. I have aimed for Autumn to be not only one of the more polished and aesthetically pleasing apps on the App Store, but among the most ethically conservative also.
  • ryandrake 8y ago
    If your app is using the Accessibility APIs, is it actually an assistive app, meant to help people with disabilities? I’ve seen apps get rejected for using Accessibiliy but not actually being accessibility apps.
• paulryanrogers 8y ago
  Why not refuse to load sites in Safari which do similar mouse and click tracking? Does Apple.com? (Real question. I'm guessing because it's too common or too CPU intense.)
  • comex 8y ago
    Because there's no centralized approval process for websites, you'd have to find a robust technical means to detect such tracking, which is pretty difficult. Identifying a particular domain or filename wouldn't work well because it could be trivially evaded – although if that's what you want, content blocker apps can do that.
• derekdahmer 8y ago
  As a product developer, screen recording has been a game changer for finding UX bugs. There's no real replacement for watching your users use your app in real world scenarios. It seems apple is only banning screen recording tools that send data to "third party" servers so hopefully there are open source self-hosted alternatives that we can use instead.
  • effingwewt 8y ago
    Ok, then you pay some people to be a sample group who will allow you to do so, not just keep it under the hood and pray you aren't found out. Things like thjs are exactly why every app should make network requests approved by the user.
    • DelightOne 8y ago
      Could you give people In-App purchases for free in exchange for the allowance to work together to improve UX?
  • stephen_g 8y ago
    From my understanding, Apple are happy for you to do it as long as it's explicitly opt-in (not just hidden in your terms of use) and there's an indication whenever the screen is being recorded.
• 0x54D5 8y ago
  If only I had the ability to edit the hosts file on device I could block all these analytics domains but apparently Apple thinks it knows better than the user so instead we have to wait for Apple to play whack-a-mole.
• laythea 8y ago
  Is this not hypocritical? I assume Apple does similar (analytics)?
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    Recording people's screens without disclosing that they're doing so? No, not really.
    • laythea 8y ago
      Disclose, like in the small text that nobody reads?
• lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  Is this really a response to the Air Canada teardown yesterday? That went viral quickly
• samwestdev 8y ago
  My company app screen record everything (using repro.io). I've tried to talk with my superiors but they don't care. Is there a way to report the app to Apple?
  • exodust 8y ago
    You want to report your company's app? That's unusual. I don't see any winners in that scenario.
    • shard972 8y ago
      The people?
    • nothanksmydude 8y ago
      Malicious Compliance is one of the better ways to make waking up on time worth it
  • tjpnz 8y ago
    Does your company have a whistleblowing hotline? If it were me I would start there. If that doesn't bring you any satisfaction you might want to consider getting out.
    • thatoneyouthrow 8y ago
      That advice will probably get him fired. This will look like a fringe political issue to everyone else.
• desc 8y ago
  It's a good thing that platform providers are locking down this sort of thing. The problem is a culture of 'it's ok, everyone else does it, the world runs on it, maybe things need to change, but we need to find an alternative equivalent first.' No. It was always wrong. It was never justifiable. Permission was never requested, only assumed. If you are recording my screen without making it abundantly clear up-front that you are doing so and why, and without allowing me to decline without providing any additional identifying information, you are automatically unworthy of my trust, not only now but forever. The people who thought this was acceptable are unfit to make such decisions, now and forever. In short: fuck you and your advertising. Why is this sort of bullshit even allowed to be technologically possible? Because someone profits. Screw their thumbs until it isn't. You want to make money from the people using your software? You get it from them, specifically from them, by providing a worthwhile product. You should be punished for selling them to someone else. Unless you can teach them the value of that which you ask in exchange for your product, you are committing fraud. You don't get to benefit from the information you siphon from people who don't understand the value of it. You know exactly what you've done and always did; no second chance is warranted.
  • s3r3nity 8y ago
    Devil's advocate question: do you (should you) have to agree to be video-taped before entering a store on security cameras? What if you had to do that for every single store? > In short: fuck you and your advertising. Nah, I don't want to pay for every single site I visit. Content is not just given out for free. Are there limits to what counts as too much? Sure, and that's the type of discussion we should be having. > You should be punished for selling them to someone else. That's not how online advertising works. Rather, it's would be the equivalent of someone on your block knowing that your house is a 3-bedroom 1-bath, but know nothing about the people that live inside.
    • desc 8y ago
      Mmm, that's a fair set of points. I don't think that content should be produced for free, but I argue that advertising-by-invasion-by-default is only acceptable now because not enough people called it out early enough, because they didn't realise the cost. 'It's always worked this way' is not a valid defence. Building a business on something should not later affect the legality of that thing. In other words, start looking for another way for things to work instead of trying to claim that the status quo is the only way things can work. Yes, I'm aware that this probably will feel like a step or two backward. Leaving a local maximum always feels like that. [edit] I forgot to address the security camera issue. That's an awkward conflation of 'physically walking into a store where you can physically pick up and leave with an item which cost physical resources to produce' with 'asking if the person standing outside can let you look at a menu'.
• superfamicom 8y ago
  I've personally used FullStory.com to debug some especially spurious bugs in many a browser. I do with it was opt-in only but I haven't seen such a system.
• dep_b 8y ago
  Perhaps Apple was already waiting for an outrage like this. It allows them to be “forced” to shut down third-party logging. Which only hurts competitors. What can Google say? “Well....on Android we’re not a third-party...”? They’ve kicked out tracking already on Safari. This is the next step. It makes Google’s software look like spyware.
• thisisweirdok 8y ago
  Hah, you think that's bad just look at all the sites that use Hotjar. Some entry-level UX person at thousands of companies can see you typing in all your credit card data.
  • gammateam 8y ago
    Or Fullstory! Way back in 2016 that analytics package could already show you the full screen and every click on someone using a website or native ios/android mobile app. All so you can "optimize your A/B testing" lol. But don't worry, there won't be a Netflix documentary or Congressional subpoena till 2025, LOONNNNG after your startup's exit. Until then, Zuckerburg gets to be the face of this general disdain and luckily gets to honestly have no idea about what is going on, because third parties integrated into his apps are the ones doing all the recording, user monitoring and data sharing.
• dreamcompiler 8y ago
  Yet another reason why I'll happily interact with your business on the web, but I won't download your app unless it's obviously essential.
  • stevepotter 8y ago
    Same thing for web - https://www.fullstory.com https://www.fullstory.com
• tqi 8y ago
  Do any of the first party iOS apps (imessage, safari, podcasts, etc) collect analytics data?
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    They do.
• ggm 8y ago
  I'm waiting for the reveal of what Apple does with state actors, and I am waiting for the evidence there can be anything close to 'sunlight on certificates' or other forms of transparancy around what they do. So, yes, we win when Apple fights for our privacy. What I need to understand is what we lost in this, and what compromises lie underneath, and how much the state(s) at large secured wins which we aren't winning on, they are. Key escrow for instance. Insights into phone use. Monetisation of information feeds forbidden to third parties. I still prefer signal to iMessage.
• ryanmt 8y ago
  I can't even read this because of the leading space tripping up my eyes!
• stevepotter 8y ago
  I've used screen recording systems in both web and mobile and found them to be very valuable tools. And I've only ever used them to troubleshoot and improve the product. Never shared the data. That said, I've always been disturbed that it was considered fine to do. I think Apple's move is great. I hope other apps stores do the same. I think it should be done for text-based analytics like GA as well, as they get so detailed that it's pretty much the same as screen recording.
• landonxjames 8y ago
  Several friends and I recently noticed the red navigation bar indicating screen recording for a couple seconds after closing instagram. At the time I wrote it off as nothing, but now I wonder if even apps that big are doing similar things.
• ValleyOfTheMtns 8y ago
  Why not provide this as something the user has to give permission for, similar to providing access to the microphone or camera?
• tokyodude 8y ago
  Seems like a poorly thought out policy. It should be another permission. "App ABC would like to capture your screen Y/N" Also IMO if Apple was really serious about privacy they'd remove the permission for apps to use your camera and see all your photos and instead require apps to use a system camera a UI (so the system takes the picture, not the app) and similarly if an app wants a photo from your library it should be required to use some system photo selector so that the app can only see the photos you select for it. As it is, every app that asks for camera permission can use the camera anytime it wants for any reason. Similarly any app that asks for permission to see your photos can see all of your photos anytime it wants. Neither of those is compatible with the idea that Apple is a privacy first company. Note that if Apple enforced those you wouldn't need to grant most apps camera and photo library permissions since they wouldn't get access to the camera data unless you took a picture while in the app or select photos. I get it might suck in that gating the camera to system only means experimental camera apps are out. Maybe they could find a way to add secure hooks or maybe they need to add a new permission that hopefully security conscious people would rarely grant which is "Can this app access the camera anytime it wants for any reason including spying on you?" Similarly only using the system photo selector would mean apps can't make fancier photo selectors but again, you could add permission for that if it's really important. For example Dropbox/Google/Flickr/Facebook upload all your photos features would need a "Can this app spy on 100% of the photos on your device?" AFAIK access to depth data currently requires no permission. Seems again that that's not a privacy-first policy. Also, Apple is apparently yanking the ability for for webpages to access orientation data. Why should apps be any different?
  • crishoj 8y ago
    I would like to see a camera access indicator in the iOS status bar, which appears whenever a camera is active. Another approach could be to require a separate permission for “covert” (off-screen) camera usage — i.e. capturing images or video without a camera preview on the screen.
  • jammygit 8y ago
    I naively thought that was how computers worked when I was younger. It still feels weird that it isn't the case
• LoSboccacc 8y ago
  They raising voice now to cover the obvious question underneath, how did such app bypass their precious review and approval system?
• makecheck 8y ago
  When the average app can send dozens of megabytes with no one blinking an eye, lots of stuff can slip though. I’ve long said that platforms need to enforce limits, hard limits, on all I/O. And in order for something to get an exception, the system should have a big, obvious, inconvenient work-around that places plenty of blame directly on the developer (e.g. “The application Foobar is using an extremely abnormal amount of your battery power, and has used your Internet service more extensively over the past hour than any other app on your device. We recommend uninstalling this program completely, or select one of the throttling choices below:”.) And frankly, there is no shortage of reasons why we should do this: to prevent abuses like this latest one, to prevent draining batteries, to avoid expensive data plan overages, etc. (and heck, to save the planet, because stupid simple things should not require a pile of natural resources to download to your device). I’m truly sorry if your overblown JavaScript framework can’t draw 3 lines of text on the screen without transferring an entire 1990 operating system’s worth of code over the network for each paragraph. Yet if devices start enforcing really tiny limits (my vote is, oh, 2 kilobytes of data), I bet your organization will finally figure out what data is really important. Good luck.
  • banachtarski 8y ago
    I can't say I agree at all with this hyperbolic reaction. How about people just be judicious about what they install and who they trust as always. I'm for privacy as much as the next person but not when it infringes on an open platform to the degree that you suggest, and Apple already overreaches in terms of censorship and control IMO.
    • mikejb 8y ago
      > How about people just be judicious about what they install and who they trust as always. That sounds good, but how well does it work? I'd you find an app that solves a use case for you - what factors do you use to determine whether you trust this developer? How can the average iPhone (/smartphone) user apply this?
      • banachtarski 8y ago
• chrisper 8y ago
  I think if the next iPhone will have USB-C, I will switch over from Android. The general app quality on iOS seems to be much better than Android.
• piyush_soni 8y ago
  I don't understand why it is sending 'notices' to developers. Why can't it be a proper permission like all others - which the users have to explicitly allow when an app tries to do that? That will be proper security.
  • standardsam 8y ago
    How would that be technically possible? All the app needs to do is log the user’s taps and swipes and then replay those inputs on a copy of their app.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  As an Android user since the original Samsung Galaxy I only have this to say - I'm literally browsing the iPhone section of the Apple website right now.
• wundersoy 8y ago
  Let’s pretend that clicktale or something similar doesn’t exist on the majority of big websites
• tomelders 8y ago
  They should just ban first, explain later, in this scenario. The app developers know full well what they're doing, and the remedy should be punitive for scumbag outfits that operate like this.
• amelius 8y ago
  > "What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone" Users might get into serious trouble with this kind of mis-information. Apple should rephrase their slogan.
• z3t4 8y ago
  I think apps that do recording/tracking should be forced to have a message similar to tobacco products. I think users should be able to do whatever they like with their devices, so I'm against closed ecosystems. But users should at least be able to make informed decisions.
• skarz 8y ago
  This is a really dumb move. It's not like Apple was previously unaware of this, there were entire venture backed companies built entirely around being able to do this and they've been around for years. Despite seeming scary, this is actually the most benign form of data collection. People have this naive notion that companies have this obsessive desire to track them as an individual. Working at tech companies, this could not be further from the truth. I do not give a shit about you as an individual, I care about you as a collection of attributes that I can correlate with the attributes of the rest of the user base. The only time I care about you as an individual is if you're reaching out to our customer service as an individual with a problem and I want to help diagnose it. The problem with screen recording data is remarkably useless for anything else because it's too high fidelity to be aggregated. If I want to serve you more personalized ads or manipulate you into purchasing something, there are other tools that are far more appropriate for the purpose. The only reason Apple is doing this is for PR reasons, to help signal to everyone that they're a privacy conscious business. But they're doing this by leveraging people's misunderstanding of how data collection is done and banking on emotional fears rather than actual damage.