13 ms·

Why Does My Remote Control Need to Know My Location?

214 points by edent 8y ago

forrestthewoods 8y ago
> Google, in its wisdom, has tied "Location" into things like BLE Scanning and WiFi scanning. The excuse is that you can use these things as a proxy for location. That is, if I know you are near access point X your location is probably near Y. There’s a reason Apple Maps says “enable WiFi to improve location accuracy”. I’m incredibly annoyed that phones don’t report themselves with randomized Mac addresses. WiFi tracking is pervasive.
- kllrnohj 8y ago
  > I’m incredibly annoyed that phones don’t report themselves with randomized Mac addresses. WiFi tracking is pervasive. You've got it backwards. The phone isn't being tracked, the phone is the one doing the tracking. The phone is looking at all the wifi APs it can see and then looking those up in a database. Nobody sees the phone's MAC address. It isn't broadcasting anything at all.
  - forrestthewoods 8y ago
    Phone probes contain their MAC address. Although the internet tells me iOS 8 did add randomization.
vodkaPong 8y ago
Could Google enable this feature without harming user privacy? What if they allowed you to name SSIDs such as 'Home' or 'Work', and then when the app scanned for networks in your house it would only see 'Home'?
anu7df 8y ago
Funny. Usually I have the exact opposite problem. Where the hell is the remote?
- johnwards 8y ago
  If you only enabled that location tracking you wouldn't be in this problem.... :D
_archon_ 8y ago
It does not. If a device requires your location to work, it is not a remote, it's something else.
mosselman 8y ago
Fitbit does this as well: if you want to sync your 'steps' to the app (on android at least) you have to enable location services... wtf?
- VLM 8y ago
  four or five sig figs of internal pedometer step counts is rubbed up against four or so sig figs of phone-gathered GPS distance data after formal activities in the fitbit app to fine tune your stride length. In my case my stride length is about 75.821 cm per step. Then it can use that calculated stride length to estimate distances when not doing official activities. As if my hiking boots are identical to five sig figs to my urban walking shoes or my sandals, LOL. Well, in theory, at least, its a good idea. Fitbit UI, weirdly, explains what its doing but refuses to provide the actual numeric result. To some extent its overkill... from my experience orienteering as a civilian and in the military, your average stride length might vary up to 5% based on conditions. You can't use dead reckoning alone to do land nav on foot for long distances, you need a map (or GPS). Which I guess is kinda the point of the fitbit needing GPS access. Doing theoretical calculations to 4 sig figs means at least on average its not too far off, and frankly most athletes use the same boring path every day with the same shoes etc so averaged track data is going to be more accurate than a wilderness land nav course anyway. I have not decompiled the fitbit code or done anything illegal but IF I were to implement this I'd include GPS/map based ground slope data as a correction factor because I know that has a major impact on stride length. I have no idea if fitbit does that, but they should.
  - brlewis 8y ago
    Fitbit UI, weirdly, explains what its doing but refuses to provide the actual numeric result. Look under "How do I change my stride length?" on the page below. The same place you change it you can also see it. https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/1135 https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/1135 Disclosure: #fitbitemployee but speaking only for myself.
  - tzs 8y ago
    I don't have a Fitbit, but I do carry an iPhone which includes a pedometer in the "Health" app. It's notion of stride length is interesting. I exported my daily step count and distance walked, and divided that later by the former to get the stride length. I plotted this data. step counts: https://i.stack.imgur.com/x0TPU.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/x0TPU.png distance: https://i.stack.imgur.com/sufma.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/sufma.png Both quite reasonable looking. Inferred stride length: https://i.stack.imgur.com/giz7V.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/giz7V.png Note that it breaks down into 5 distinct regions, with very sharp boundaries between them. Within each region the stride length has a fairly level average but a lot of variation around that. When you cross a region boundary, same patter but the average shifts down (sometimes dramatically, such as the shift in early 2016). I have no explanation for any of these shifts except that last one and maybe the small one around Oct 2016. The last one, in the middle of 2018, corresponds to my changing phones from in iPhone 6 plus to an iPhone x. That small one before that matches up with when we switched to full time work at home The earlier shifts were all on the iPhone 6 plus, and as far as I can tell do not correlate with iOS updates, or with anything in my life that might change my stride size such as seasonal changes (I probably take smaller strides in winter) or getting new shoes. I asked about this on apple.stackexchange.com, but it got no answers or comments, a down vote, and was automatically deleted as a dead question.
tyingq 8y ago
The coarse permissions and alarming text from the OS is a problem with both Android and iOS. Often, an app wants something fairly innocous, but has to ask for more, because it's grouped with other things in the same permission ask. Then, the OS message shifts all the blame with scary messages about what the app wants to do.
- creeble 8y ago
  Indeed. Our app once required location permissions because - get this - a webkit view used for settings used jQuery, which did some kind of screen orientation thing that somehow required location be turned on from the app. I think a jQuery update fixed it, but don't recall. It wasn't simple to track down either. Disclosure: I work on a Sonos competitor [1] that tracks customer data purely for product improvement and is fully opt-out-able. [1] https://www.bluesound.com https://www.bluesound.com
- neilsimp1 8y ago
  Well I agree lots of times what the app wants is innocuous, I'd still rather have the message than not. Maybe an option to open up a more detailed description of what the app wants the permissions for?
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Yes there should be much finer detail in permissions.
    - ryanbrunner 8y ago
      Would it have helped in this case? Permissions should convey the privacy risk to the user, not just the technical details of what's happening. To a non-technical user, "Access nearby Wifi signals" (or something similar) sounds totally innocuous. Most people would approve that assuming that the app just wants to connect to the internet. You could get more detailed and say "Access nearby Wifi signals, which could reveal your location", which conveys the privacy risk. But to the average user, "access nearby wifi signals" isn't adding anything - the only real privacy risk is that location is revealed, so it just makes sense to convey it as your location. There's other cases where I think there's a better case for finer-grained permissions - some apps ask for phone call permission just so they can know whether you're a call or not - arguably something that should hardly require permission at all, but it's lumped in with one of the more scary sounding ones.
codetrotter 8y ago
> Google, in its wisdom, has tied "Location" into things like BLE Scanning and WiFi scanning. The excuse is that you can use these things as a proxy for location. That is, if I know you are near access point X your location is probably near Y. It’s not an “excuse”, it’s a fact. If you allow an app to scan SSIDs you are allowing it to know your location. No amount of sarcasm on the part of OP is going to change that.
- seanalltogether 8y ago
  But this is a failure on Googles part to not have a streamlined api for detecting external devices, a feature which is becoming more and more popular with smart devices. Apple has protocols like WAC that you can conform to and be visible to an iOS user without anything special. Inside your app you hand off control to the user to identify and pair that device so that you as a developer don't need special permissions and custom code to link things up. Our iOS app is able to run without any special prompts for the user on first run, whereas our Android app has to ask for location services with lengthy explanations before they can get past the first screen.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Google desperately wants location services enabled and will use any wedge possible to force it on. They even disable the center on my location button in the maps app even though the app knows very well where your current location is.
  - bbulkow 8y ago
    This seems the classic 'ease of use' vs privacy. Google has done the right thing for privacy, because an app that can scan for ssid can determine location and report it if it has any outside connection. Good for google to equate the two, this was always a well known hole. One suggestion- please update your blog, if this thread convinces you that Google did the right thing. Those posts hang around and impact product engineering. What kind of api would you propose? The only one i can think of is one that says 'connect to x' instead of 'list all ssid', which still tells you about location but not a lot. I occasionally think about g+ shutdown, and how Google engineered quite a bit for privacy, and removed things like games that leak location and quizzes, and forced people to create groups, which is the right thing but people liked the rich experience of facebook. Now that many are fleeibg from fb, they can't go to g+. Sorry to thread-jack. Clearly i have a blog post pent up.
derriz 8y ago
At least they acknowledged it, responded to the feedback and fixed it. Unfortunately I have a Sonos system which became effectively bricked unless I signed a new user agreement allowing the collection of data. There are no physical controls on Sonos so the system becomes useless without accepting. They used to sell dedicated controllers/remotes years ago but these were also bricked as part of an upgrade about a year or two ago. Unhappy owners were offered a voucher (worth less than the value of a single controller - many users owned multiple in order to fully support multi-room - see https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-software-228995/save-the-cr100-6800510 https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-software-228995/s...) for their next Sonos purchase rather than allow them to continue to use the hardware they had purchased and used happily for years. All concerns, requests to be allowed to downgrade, etc. are met on the official forums with a passive-aggressive dismissal of users' concerns by staff backed up by a few cultist fanatics. I've tried to avoid any further updates (and deny Sonos access to my listening habits) by having it run on a disconnected network but if anyone accidentally updates the app on the old ipad we use as a controller, your forced to update everything. I just wish I had the same system which I originally bought which I use exclusively to play my ripped CDs from a NAS.
- hedora 8y ago
  Does anyone know of a good (from a privacy and usability perspective) alternative to Sonos? I plan to buy 5-6 of them sometime later this year, and for what that costs, they have no excuse to data-harvest me.
  - MayeulC 8y ago
    Well, there's snapcast that allows you to relatively simply build an alternative, but I don't know if anyone builds and sells ready-made products. You can probably go by using a couple raspberry pis (or any ARM board with a jack output), a preconfigured SD card image, and some external speakers. I don't know the price of Sonos speakers, but I don't think it would be much higher. I guess someone could even create a business out of this, especially if tailoring the PCBs to the task.
  - bbeekley 8y ago
thachnb 8y ago
Android app with Bluetooth/Wifi scanning ability needs Location permission to perform the task, that's GOOGLE policy. :/
tempodox 8y ago
Isn't the answer always the same? To optimize performance and offer services individually tailored to the user. Privacy is a myth from the past.
phakding 8y ago
I think Google is the culprit here. Not just for wifi scanning, but also for Bluetooth, Google demands location permissions. In last 5 years or so, I have had a Garmin, a Fitbit and now a Garmin watch. I never used to have to enable location with my first Garmin tracker untill I upgraded Android os. After that point onward all my fitness trackers now ask to enable location in order to connect to my phone.
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  For good reason! There's many online services where you can put in a wifi MAC and pretty much know within 100M where someone is. Yeah, the message could be made clearer about what's actually being allowed, but in the end I'm glad it's there. Maybe a generic system for when you request a permission being able to provide an explanation string or something. I know some apps made a pop-up before the prompt but I found that rather verbose especially when it was incredibly obvious why they needed the permission.
  - jsjohnst 8y ago
    > There's many online services where you can put in a wifi MAC and pretty much know within 100M where someone is. Minor nitpick, it’s the BSSID that’s used to lookup the location. In some cases the BSSID is the same as the MAC address (usually with cheaper consumer gear), but it’s not the case with APs that are broadcasting (or have capability to broadcast) more than one SSID. As one example, think of APs that have “Home” and “Guest” separate networks.
  - falcolas 8y ago
    > There's many online services where you can put in a wifi MAC and pretty much know within 100M where someone is. Somewhat ironically because Google went and made that dataset, then publicized it.
    - kllrnohj 8y ago
      Google is far from the only one to have that dataset. Apple has one, too, for example, as does Skyhook. And Mozilla ( https://location.services.mozilla.com/ https://location.services.mozilla.com/ ).
tcbawo 8y ago
Is there a virtualization app/service that can sit between the OS and an app that allows me to see or restrict what an application actually sees? For example I may allow it to see my public contacts rather than all contacts. Or, I may provide it with a location once rather than whenever they request it.
- VLM 8y ago
  Some google searches for old custom roms for Android would help. I recall stuff like this in non-commercial 2.0-series android custom roms. For a very specific example of the genre, pdroid and its numerous clones (some of which were trojans as I recall) from around 2011 seems to almost perfectly match your request. You know you're in deep when you have to root your phone, install a custom rom, then patch the custom rom, just to limit how much you're getting spied upon.
conesus 8y ago
I designed and built a wooden remote control[1] so I know a bit about why this is. My iOS app asks the user for location permissions because without it the remote control app won't know when to attempt to connect when you walk in the door with your iPhone but your remote is sitting at home, waiting for you to hit it to turn on your lights or play music on your Sonos. If you hit the button and nothing happens, that's a horrible user experience! I used to have location set to Always even though I don't store the location (and I'm explicit about that, even going so far as to open source the entire app ecosystem[2]) but then Apple pushed back and said that always having a location was against their ToS for remotes. I then switched to a geofence, which is still a location based permission but takes less battery life. For Apple the tradeoff was not privacy but battery life. If I were to store your geofence information on my servers (which, ick) that would be OK as long as it was in teeny tiny text in my privacy policy. So while other remote control products are happy to take that information and sell it I decided to not double dip since you already pay once for the product. This is similar to my news reader which also has competitors that sell users' data. The tradeoff for me is that I earn a lot less than I theoretically could, but again, I don't double dip. Benefits of indie technology vs. venture-backed technology. [1] Turn Touch: https://turntouch.com https://turntouch.com [2] iOS source code: https://github.com/samuelclay/turntouch-ios https://github.com/samuelclay/turntouch-ios
- lultimouomo 8y ago
  Hi! You might be interested to know that the Turn Touch homepage starts playing audio as soon as it is opened. This was enough for me to close it and never come back, and I think this sentiment is reasonably widespread. I'm genuinely curios about the reason some people decide to add audio (or video for that matter, but audio is way worse) on autoplay. Do you enjoy when web pages you visit do it? Did you see from some kind of metric that it increases your sales?
  - conesus 8y ago
    Yikes! It's part of a hidden video that shouldn't play until you explicitly open it. What's your browser/OS? I tested on Chrome, Safari, and FF on mac as well as iOS. I also just added a muted attribute to the `video` tag so it should no longer do that even if I messed up the JS for some browser somewhere. I encourage you to try it once again to confirm.
everyone 8y ago
I would blame lot of this sort of thing on various frameworks / sdks / libraries and whatnot. Many of them demand all sorts of permissions like this. If you dont want to write everything from scratch then u are stuck with this sort of crap.
ubermonkey 8y ago
Not for nothing, but: apps as remotes for stereos kind of suck, don't they? It's way faster, IME, to pick up the physical remote and use it.
PaulHoule 8y ago
Quite a few "smart home" devices use location information to determine when the sun rises and sets.
Finnucane 8y ago
There are days when I am glad when most of my things are old and stupid.
Bud 8y ago
I think the obvious glaring flaw here is deciding to have a remote control for an amplifier run Android. Why on earth would that be necessary?
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  I'd guess it's easy and cheap. You can make a purpose built remote with BLE and a nice screen, or buy a cheap Android phone for a fifth (guessing!) of the dev costs?
- edent 8y ago
  To clarify. The amp does have a physical infrared remote. It also has an Android app I can run on my phone. I always know where my phone is, but the regular remote likes to hide in the sofa.
dreamcompiler 8y ago
Once again, this stuff won't stop until it becomes impossible for apps to tell whether private data is enabled or not. And the way to do that is with a data-spoofing layer controlled by the user below the API.
api 8y ago
Do we even need to ask this question?
ams6110 8y ago
> Perhaps I should find some AA batteries for the physical remote instead We have a winner!
thoughtexprmnt 8y ago
I recall ditching a relatively high-end router a year or two ago after a firmware update required me to accept that in order to use most of the advanced features supported by the router, essentially all of my household's web activity would be sent to a 3rd party data collection service. Thanks but no thanks.
hyperman1 8y ago
All these stories give me a though choice. Should I auto update apps on android? Clearly the answer is Yes because of security updates and bug fixes, and maybe the occasional interesting feature. Besides, once in a while an android developing HN poster will complain about all those pesky users that just don't update, and I know their pain very well. Clearly the answer is No because I have no idea if the app will continue to work tomorrow after the next update? Will it start doing something sleazy, causing a worse security problem than just being hacked? Will it break because I happen to use an edge case which will be buggy. I could manually update after a few days have passed, so I can make an informed choice. But finding detailed info for 1 app is challenging, and there are 40 or so on my phone. That's about a full time job, and my parents and neighbors have smart phones too. I mean, I love my radio. You push power, you get music. Easy. I' pretty sure this will happen tomorrow, just like it did the last 20 years. It's not going to decide one day to start walking around and sell a map of the house to ikea or whatever. Now why can't I ask from my phone, being a personal organiser and extension of my mind, to be as trustworthy as this? For now, my personal compromise is to auto update firefox, manually update the OS, and firewall the others and never ever update them when they work well enough. I trust firefox and HME(OS, zombie Nokia) not to fuck up too bad and fix things reasonably fast. I wish i could trust the ecosystems more and just auto update everything, but today? Not gonna happen.
flyinghamster 8y ago
When Slacker Radio decided it wanted my contact list, out it went. Sorry, but that information is NOT YOURS. These days, if any important-to-me app is slated to be updated, I first run a backup in case ridiculous permission demands, feature removal, or other such f*ckery comes with the update.
Zombiethrowaway 8y ago
In a similar fashion, why does Google Play needs access to my Contacts each time I want to use Maps?

214 points by edent 8y ago

> Google, in its wisdom, has tied "Location" into things like BLE Scanning and WiFi scanning. The excuse is that you can use these things as a proxy for location. That is, if I know you are near access point X your location is probably near Y. There’s a reason Apple Maps says “enable WiFi to improve location accuracy”. I’m incredibly annoyed that phones don’t report themselves with randomized Mac addresses. WiFi tracking is pervasive.

kllrnohj 8y ago
> I’m incredibly annoyed that phones don’t report themselves with randomized Mac addresses. WiFi tracking is pervasive. You've got it backwards. The phone isn't being tracked, the phone is the one doing the tracking. The phone is looking at all the wifi APs it can see and then looking those up in a database. Nobody sees the phone's MAC address. It isn't broadcasting anything at all.
- forrestthewoods 8y ago
  Phone probes contain their MAC address. Although the internet tells me iOS 8 did add randomization.

vodkaPong 8y ago

Could Google enable this feature without harming user privacy? What if they allowed you to name SSIDs such as 'Home' or 'Work', and then when the app scanned for networks in your house it would only see 'Home'?

anu7df 8y ago

Funny. Usually I have the exact opposite problem. Where the hell is the remote?

johnwards 8y ago
If you only enabled that location tracking you wouldn't be in this problem.... :D

_archon_ 8y ago

It does not. If a device requires your location to work, it is not a remote, it's something else.

mosselman 8y ago

Fitbit does this as well: if you want to sync your 'steps' to the app (on android at least) you have to enable location services... wtf?

VLM 8y ago
four or five sig figs of internal pedometer step counts is rubbed up against four or so sig figs of phone-gathered GPS distance data after formal activities in the fitbit app to fine tune your stride length. In my case my stride length is about 75.821 cm per step. Then it can use that calculated stride length to estimate distances when not doing official activities. As if my hiking boots are identical to five sig figs to my urban walking shoes or my sandals, LOL. Well, in theory, at least, its a good idea. Fitbit UI, weirdly, explains what its doing but refuses to provide the actual numeric result. To some extent its overkill... from my experience orienteering as a civilian and in the military, your average stride length might vary up to 5% based on conditions. You can't use dead reckoning alone to do land nav on foot for long distances, you need a map (or GPS). Which I guess is kinda the point of the fitbit needing GPS access. Doing theoretical calculations to 4 sig figs means at least on average its not too far off, and frankly most athletes use the same boring path every day with the same shoes etc so averaged track data is going to be more accurate than a wilderness land nav course anyway. I have not decompiled the fitbit code or done anything illegal but IF I were to implement this I'd include GPS/map based ground slope data as a correction factor because I know that has a major impact on stride length. I have no idea if fitbit does that, but they should.
- brlewis 8y ago
  Fitbit UI, weirdly, explains what its doing but refuses to provide the actual numeric result. Look under "How do I change my stride length?" on the page below. The same place you change it you can also see it. https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/1135 https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/1135 Disclosure: #fitbitemployee but speaking only for myself.
- tzs 8y ago
  I don't have a Fitbit, but I do carry an iPhone which includes a pedometer in the "Health" app. It's notion of stride length is interesting. I exported my daily step count and distance walked, and divided that later by the former to get the stride length. I plotted this data. step counts: https://i.stack.imgur.com/x0TPU.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/x0TPU.png distance: https://i.stack.imgur.com/sufma.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/sufma.png Both quite reasonable looking. Inferred stride length: https://i.stack.imgur.com/giz7V.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/giz7V.png Note that it breaks down into 5 distinct regions, with very sharp boundaries between them. Within each region the stride length has a fairly level average but a lot of variation around that. When you cross a region boundary, same patter but the average shifts down (sometimes dramatically, such as the shift in early 2016). I have no explanation for any of these shifts except that last one and maybe the small one around Oct 2016. The last one, in the middle of 2018, corresponds to my changing phones from in iPhone 6 plus to an iPhone x. That small one before that matches up with when we switched to full time work at home The earlier shifts were all on the iPhone 6 plus, and as far as I can tell do not correlate with iOS updates, or with anything in my life that might change my stride size such as seasonal changes (I probably take smaller strides in winter) or getting new shoes. I asked about this on apple.stackexchange.com, but it got no answers or comments, a down vote, and was automatically deleted as a dead question.

tyingq 8y ago

The coarse permissions and alarming text from the OS is a problem with both Android and iOS. Often, an app wants something fairly innocous, but has to ask for more, because it's grouped with other things in the same permission ask. Then, the OS message shifts all the blame with scary messages about what the app wants to do.

creeble 8y ago
Indeed. Our app once required location permissions because - get this - a webkit view used for settings used jQuery, which did some kind of screen orientation thing that somehow required location be turned on from the app. I think a jQuery update fixed it, but don't recall. It wasn't simple to track down either. Disclosure: I work on a Sonos competitor [1] that tracks customer data purely for product improvement and is fully opt-out-able. [1] https://www.bluesound.com https://www.bluesound.com
neilsimp1 8y ago
Well I agree lots of times what the app wants is innocuous, I'd still rather have the message than not. Maybe an option to open up a more detailed description of what the app wants the permissions for?
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Yes there should be much finer detail in permissions.
  - ryanbrunner 8y ago
    Would it have helped in this case? Permissions should convey the privacy risk to the user, not just the technical details of what's happening. To a non-technical user, "Access nearby Wifi signals" (or something similar) sounds totally innocuous. Most people would approve that assuming that the app just wants to connect to the internet. You could get more detailed and say "Access nearby Wifi signals, which could reveal your location", which conveys the privacy risk. But to the average user, "access nearby wifi signals" isn't adding anything - the only real privacy risk is that location is revealed, so it just makes sense to convey it as your location. There's other cases where I think there's a better case for finer-grained permissions - some apps ask for phone call permission just so they can know whether you're a call or not - arguably something that should hardly require permission at all, but it's lumped in with one of the more scary sounding ones.

codetrotter 8y ago

> Google, in its wisdom, has tied "Location" into things like BLE Scanning and WiFi scanning. The excuse is that you can use these things as a proxy for location. That is, if I know you are near access point X your location is probably near Y. It’s not an “excuse”, it’s a fact. If you allow an app to scan SSIDs you are allowing it to know your location. No amount of sarcasm on the part of OP is going to change that.

seanalltogether 8y ago
But this is a failure on Googles part to not have a streamlined api for detecting external devices, a feature which is becoming more and more popular with smart devices. Apple has protocols like WAC that you can conform to and be visible to an iOS user without anything special. Inside your app you hand off control to the user to identify and pair that device so that you as a developer don't need special permissions and custom code to link things up. Our iOS app is able to run without any special prompts for the user on first run, whereas our Android app has to ask for location services with lengthy explanations before they can get past the first screen.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Google desperately wants location services enabled and will use any wedge possible to force it on. They even disable the center on my location button in the maps app even though the app knows very well where your current location is.
- bbulkow 8y ago
  This seems the classic 'ease of use' vs privacy. Google has done the right thing for privacy, because an app that can scan for ssid can determine location and report it if it has any outside connection. Good for google to equate the two, this was always a well known hole. One suggestion- please update your blog, if this thread convinces you that Google did the right thing. Those posts hang around and impact product engineering. What kind of api would you propose? The only one i can think of is one that says 'connect to x' instead of 'list all ssid', which still tells you about location but not a lot. I occasionally think about g+ shutdown, and how Google engineered quite a bit for privacy, and removed things like games that leak location and quizzes, and forced people to create groups, which is the right thing but people liked the rich experience of facebook. Now that many are fleeibg from fb, they can't go to g+. Sorry to thread-jack. Clearly i have a blog post pent up.

derriz 8y ago

At least they acknowledged it, responded to the feedback and fixed it. Unfortunately I have a Sonos system which became effectively bricked unless I signed a new user agreement allowing the collection of data. There are no physical controls on Sonos so the system becomes useless without accepting. They used to sell dedicated controllers/remotes years ago but these were also bricked as part of an upgrade about a year or two ago. Unhappy owners were offered a voucher (worth less than the value of a single controller - many users owned multiple in order to fully support multi-room - see https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-software-228995/save-the-cr100-6800510 https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-software-228995/s...) for their next Sonos purchase rather than allow them to continue to use the hardware they had purchased and used happily for years. All concerns, requests to be allowed to downgrade, etc. are met on the official forums with a passive-aggressive dismissal of users' concerns by staff backed up by a few cultist fanatics. I've tried to avoid any further updates (and deny Sonos access to my listening habits) by having it run on a disconnected network but if anyone accidentally updates the app on the old ipad we use as a controller, your forced to update everything. I just wish I had the same system which I originally bought which I use exclusively to play my ripped CDs from a NAS.

hedora 8y ago
Does anyone know of a good (from a privacy and usability perspective) alternative to Sonos? I plan to buy 5-6 of them sometime later this year, and for what that costs, they have no excuse to data-harvest me.
- MayeulC 8y ago
  Well, there's snapcast that allows you to relatively simply build an alternative, but I don't know if anyone builds and sells ready-made products. You can probably go by using a couple raspberry pis (or any ARM board with a jack output), a preconfigured SD card image, and some external speakers. I don't know the price of Sonos speakers, but I don't think it would be much higher. I guess someone could even create a business out of this, especially if tailoring the PCBs to the task.
- bbeekley 8y ago

thachnb 8y ago

Android app with Bluetooth/Wifi scanning ability needs Location permission to perform the task, that's GOOGLE policy. :/

tempodox 8y ago

Isn't the answer always the same? To optimize performance and offer services individually tailored to the user. Privacy is a myth from the past.

phakding 8y ago

I think Google is the culprit here. Not just for wifi scanning, but also for Bluetooth, Google demands location permissions. In last 5 years or so, I have had a Garmin, a Fitbit and now a Garmin watch. I never used to have to enable location with my first Garmin tracker untill I upgraded Android os. After that point onward all my fitness trackers now ask to enable location in order to connect to my phone.

shittyadmin 8y ago
For good reason! There's many online services where you can put in a wifi MAC and pretty much know within 100M where someone is. Yeah, the message could be made clearer about what's actually being allowed, but in the end I'm glad it's there. Maybe a generic system for when you request a permission being able to provide an explanation string or something. I know some apps made a pop-up before the prompt but I found that rather verbose especially when it was incredibly obvious why they needed the permission.
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  > There's many online services where you can put in a wifi MAC and pretty much know within 100M where someone is. Minor nitpick, it’s the BSSID that’s used to lookup the location. In some cases the BSSID is the same as the MAC address (usually with cheaper consumer gear), but it’s not the case with APs that are broadcasting (or have capability to broadcast) more than one SSID. As one example, think of APs that have “Home” and “Guest” separate networks.
- falcolas 8y ago
  > There's many online services where you can put in a wifi MAC and pretty much know within 100M where someone is. Somewhat ironically because Google went and made that dataset, then publicized it.
  - kllrnohj 8y ago
    Google is far from the only one to have that dataset. Apple has one, too, for example, as does Skyhook. And Mozilla ( https://location.services.mozilla.com/ https://location.services.mozilla.com/ ).

tcbawo 8y ago

Is there a virtualization app/service that can sit between the OS and an app that allows me to see or restrict what an application actually sees? For example I may allow it to see my public contacts rather than all contacts. Or, I may provide it with a location once rather than whenever they request it.

VLM 8y ago
Some google searches for old custom roms for Android would help. I recall stuff like this in non-commercial 2.0-series android custom roms. For a very specific example of the genre, pdroid and its numerous clones (some of which were trojans as I recall) from around 2011 seems to almost perfectly match your request. You know you're in deep when you have to root your phone, install a custom rom, then patch the custom rom, just to limit how much you're getting spied upon.

conesus 8y ago

I designed and built a wooden remote control[1] so I know a bit about why this is. My iOS app asks the user for location permissions because without it the remote control app won't know when to attempt to connect when you walk in the door with your iPhone but your remote is sitting at home, waiting for you to hit it to turn on your lights or play music on your Sonos. If you hit the button and nothing happens, that's a horrible user experience! I used to have location set to Always even though I don't store the location (and I'm explicit about that, even going so far as to open source the entire app ecosystem[2]) but then Apple pushed back and said that always having a location was against their ToS for remotes. I then switched to a geofence, which is still a location based permission but takes less battery life. For Apple the tradeoff was not privacy but battery life. If I were to store your geofence information on my servers (which, ick) that would be OK as long as it was in teeny tiny text in my privacy policy. So while other remote control products are happy to take that information and sell it I decided to not double dip since you already pay once for the product. This is similar to my news reader which also has competitors that sell users' data. The tradeoff for me is that I earn a lot less than I theoretically could, but again, I don't double dip. Benefits of indie technology vs. venture-backed technology. [1] Turn Touch: https://turntouch.com https://turntouch.com [2] iOS source code: https://github.com/samuelclay/turntouch-ios https://github.com/samuelclay/turntouch-ios

lultimouomo 8y ago
Hi! You might be interested to know that the Turn Touch homepage starts playing audio as soon as it is opened. This was enough for me to close it and never come back, and I think this sentiment is reasonably widespread. I'm genuinely curios about the reason some people decide to add audio (or video for that matter, but audio is way worse) on autoplay. Do you enjoy when web pages you visit do it? Did you see from some kind of metric that it increases your sales?
- conesus 8y ago
  Yikes! It's part of a hidden video that shouldn't play until you explicitly open it. What's your browser/OS? I tested on Chrome, Safari, and FF on mac as well as iOS. I also just added a muted attribute to the `video` tag so it should no longer do that even if I messed up the JS for some browser somewhere. I encourage you to try it once again to confirm.

everyone 8y ago

I would blame lot of this sort of thing on various frameworks / sdks / libraries and whatnot. Many of them demand all sorts of permissions like this. If you dont want to write everything from scratch then u are stuck with this sort of crap.

ubermonkey 8y ago

Not for nothing, but: apps as remotes for stereos kind of suck, don't they? It's way faster, IME, to pick up the physical remote and use it.

PaulHoule 8y ago

Quite a few "smart home" devices use location information to determine when the sun rises and sets.

Finnucane 8y ago

There are days when I am glad when most of my things are old and stupid.

Bud 8y ago

I think the obvious glaring flaw here is deciding to have a remote control for an amplifier run Android. Why on earth would that be necessary?

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
I'd guess it's easy and cheap. You can make a purpose built remote with BLE and a nice screen, or buy a cheap Android phone for a fifth (guessing!) of the dev costs?
edent 8y ago
To clarify. The amp does have a physical infrared remote. It also has an Android app I can run on my phone. I always know where my phone is, but the regular remote likes to hide in the sofa.

dreamcompiler 8y ago

Once again, this stuff won't stop until it becomes impossible for apps to tell whether private data is enabled or not. And the way to do that is with a data-spoofing layer controlled by the user below the API.

api 8y ago

Do we even need to ask this question?

ams6110 8y ago

> Perhaps I should find some AA batteries for the physical remote instead We have a winner!

thoughtexprmnt 8y ago

I recall ditching a relatively high-end router a year or two ago after a firmware update required me to accept that in order to use most of the advanced features supported by the router, essentially all of my household's web activity would be sent to a 3rd party data collection service. Thanks but no thanks.

hyperman1 8y ago

All these stories give me a though choice. Should I auto update apps on android? Clearly the answer is Yes because of security updates and bug fixes, and maybe the occasional interesting feature. Besides, once in a while an android developing HN poster will complain about all those pesky users that just don't update, and I know their pain very well. Clearly the answer is No because I have no idea if the app will continue to work tomorrow after the next update? Will it start doing something sleazy, causing a worse security problem than just being hacked? Will it break because I happen to use an edge case which will be buggy. I could manually update after a few days have passed, so I can make an informed choice. But finding detailed info for 1 app is challenging, and there are 40 or so on my phone. That's about a full time job, and my parents and neighbors have smart phones too. I mean, I love my radio. You push power, you get music. Easy. I' pretty sure this will happen tomorrow, just like it did the last 20 years. It's not going to decide one day to start walking around and sell a map of the house to ikea or whatever. Now why can't I ask from my phone, being a personal organiser and extension of my mind, to be as trustworthy as this? For now, my personal compromise is to auto update firefox, manually update the OS, and firewall the others and never ever update them when they work well enough. I trust firefox and HME(OS, zombie Nokia) not to fuck up too bad and fix things reasonably fast. I wish i could trust the ecosystems more and just auto update everything, but today? Not gonna happen.

flyinghamster 8y ago

When Slacker Radio decided it wanted my contact list, out it went. Sorry, but that information is NOT YOURS. These days, if any important-to-me app is slated to be updated, I first run a backup in case ridiculous permission demands, feature removal, or other such f*ckery comes with the update.

Zombiethrowaway 8y ago

In a similar fashion, why does Google Play needs access to my Contacts each time I want to use Maps?