3 ms·

Sorry but this sounds diabolical... we need companies worthy of our trust so we can gain the benefit of the apps we’ve chosen to use, rather than avoiding them

by ssss11 6y ago

Sorry but this sounds diabolical... we need companies worthy of our trust so we can gain the benefit of the apps we’ve chosen to use, rather than avoiding them with manual workarounds. We need laws and penalties applied to companies that abuse our trust. (Yes i know, unfortunately its too late for the FAANG’s of our time)

keanebean86 6y ago
An obvious idea is Apple/google could add a dontShare flag to the contacts. Or would that be too controversial? The os would just pretend those contacts don't exist when all contacts are requested. There could be a checkbox to share protected contacts on the permissions prompt in case you're trying to actually export them.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  A better idea would be to use regulation to outlaw malware/spyware that steals your contacts list, or pressure Apple/Google to actually do their job during app review and kick such malware from their store.
  - dheera 6y ago
    Regulation is generally useless since it only applies within a jurisdiction. Unless you can convince 200+ countries to adopt it as their formal law, said spyware could always find a place to call home and still infiltrate the world. GDPR is a good example of a law that the US sheepishly somehow chooses to obey EU law (wtf, why didn't the US obey the EU laws around recycling and energy and no free plastic grocery bags for the past decade? and all of a sudden they care about obeying GDPR?), but do Central/South American, African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries take a crap about GDPR? Generally not. They don't care about EU law. It doesn't apply in their jurisdiction, and they are not sheep. That isn't to say privacy doesn't matter, it's just that the law needs to be locally implemented, not obeying some arbitrary EU interpretation of the idea that wasn't even discussed with them. As such, I think technical approaches are generally superior to regulatory approaches in user protection. They apply across the entire world instantly.
ByteJockey 6y ago
> we need companies worthy of our trust Fundamentally, that's not a thing in the long term. Trust lasts until the next bad quarter if you're lucky, because ultimately a company will choose to abuse your trust rather than go under. I don't want to come down too hard on companies here, they exist to make money, that's what they're for (and plenty of them provide very useful services). But the concept of trust doesn't make a lot of sense here. The people that make up a company aren't constant, and if you do find a company with trustworthy employees, they won't take your data with them when they leave, they will leave it for the next person to abuse. Trusting a company beyond what they explicitly promise (anything in a EULA-like document that says they can change things at any time doesn't count) is setting yourself up to be screwed down the road.
huxflux 6y ago
We had this discussion ten years ago, that we "need companies worthy of our trust". It obviously didn't work out. Question is, what do we do now?

by ssss11 6y ago

keanebean86 6y ago

An obvious idea is Apple/google could add a dontShare flag to the contacts. Or would that be too controversial? The os would just pretend those contacts don't exist when all contacts are requested. There could be a checkbox to share protected contacts on the permissions prompt in case you're trying to actually export them.

Nextgrid 6y ago
A better idea would be to use regulation to outlaw malware/spyware that steals your contacts list, or pressure Apple/Google to actually do their job during app review and kick such malware from their store.
- dheera 6y ago
  Regulation is generally useless since it only applies within a jurisdiction. Unless you can convince 200+ countries to adopt it as their formal law, said spyware could always find a place to call home and still infiltrate the world. GDPR is a good example of a law that the US sheepishly somehow chooses to obey EU law (wtf, why didn't the US obey the EU laws around recycling and energy and no free plastic grocery bags for the past decade? and all of a sudden they care about obeying GDPR?), but do Central/South American, African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries take a crap about GDPR? Generally not. They don't care about EU law. It doesn't apply in their jurisdiction, and they are not sheep. That isn't to say privacy doesn't matter, it's just that the law needs to be locally implemented, not obeying some arbitrary EU interpretation of the idea that wasn't even discussed with them. As such, I think technical approaches are generally superior to regulatory approaches in user protection. They apply across the entire world instantly.

ByteJockey 6y ago

> we need companies worthy of our trust Fundamentally, that's not a thing in the long term. Trust lasts until the next bad quarter if you're lucky, because ultimately a company will choose to abuse your trust rather than go under. I don't want to come down too hard on companies here, they exist to make money, that's what they're for (and plenty of them provide very useful services). But the concept of trust doesn't make a lot of sense here. The people that make up a company aren't constant, and if you do find a company with trustworthy employees, they won't take your data with them when they leave, they will leave it for the next person to abuse. Trusting a company beyond what they explicitly promise (anything in a EULA-like document that says they can change things at any time doesn't count) is setting yourself up to be screwed down the road.

huxflux 6y ago

We had this discussion ten years ago, that we "need companies worthy of our trust". It obviously didn't work out. Question is, what do we do now?