Rant: Sites that want to take over your info

[elecplus]

I just did a Google search for something, and the answer was on something called Quora.com. You have to be at least 13 and sign in with Google or Facebook. Hmm. Signed in with Google, and it said it wants to manage my contacts. What? No way! So I said decline, and it refused to let me see the answer. What kind of shit is this? According to Wikipedia, it is a rapidly growing public website with the best questions and answers. If people valued their privacy at all, this thing would never have gotten off the ground.

[webwit]

Reminds me of most mobile phone apps. "Hello I'm <shitty app>, I want to access your contact list, photo album and camera." Ehm, no, thank you.

[Muirium]

I've seen Quora discussions linked various places for a few years now. Eg.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/0 ... z-composer
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/0 ... ra-dropbox

Naturally I've never joined. Registration walls piss me off from the get go, as my rants about our good friends MassDrop might have mentioned a few times!

Anyway, far as I can tell, Quora is some VC funded startup that got a reputation as being a good place to get noticed. People write there because they want exposure. Quora wants you to sign up, so they can sell your data. Win-win!

We are but grazing cattle to these companies. Or maybe even just the blades of grass they feed them.

[Findecanor]

The Facebook situation is feeling more and more like a bad dream than actual reality. I don't have a Facebook account but ...
Facebook has a mobile app that listens to everything you say for keywords they can use for advertising, their photo-tagging feature is used together with face-recognition to track who are in which photos uploaded to their site and they track everyone they can through "Like" buttons on other sites.
They are pure evil... but they are considered successful, so other companies are mimicking them.

I have got a Linked-In account because an old workmate got recruited through it, and yes, I get lots of requests from recruiters through it. But Linked-In asks you for your contact list ...I have not given it to them, but apparently other people have done it, because I get lots of "Do you know this guy?" requests from Linked-In because of short email conversations I had with random people ten years ago or so.

I have got requests from recruiters about a company in my town whose business model is based on tracking people physically in shopping malls by their cell phones broadcasting their Wifi MAC addresses ... Of course I declined.
Really, I think that should be outlawed.

[andrewjoy]

Reminds me of most mobile phone apps. "Hello I'm <shitty app>, I want to access your contact list, photo album and camera." Ehm, no, thank you.

On modern android you can allow it on a per permission basis, so say if its a messaging app you can let it access contacts but when it asks for access to say the camera you can tell it where to go .

I wish that websites had this feature so that you could let it have access to what i needs to work but you can disable what you don't like and then just lose that functionality.

Its also interesting how much cross site stuff there is now, just look at the log on your add blocker and see how many external scripts run on a website, its terrible.

[seebart]

Very ture, Google came up late with the permission options, but better late than never. I'm sure Apple offers something similair on iOS. Yeah its pretty crazy to see the add blocker stats on my browser these days, automatic redirection is also a nuisance.

[Muirium]

The trouble is ubiquity. "But everyone, everyone!, uses Facebook." I get that pretty often as a firm non-user. Every juiced up startup out there is hunting for the same thing. Become the Amazon of X, the Google of Y, or the Facebook of Z. Own the planet. Mine everyone, everyone!, for data. And don't care at all about the late adopters who hold out for whatever reason. Their social circles will force them in someday, or if not they'll soon enough be dead.

Nobody opts out. Everyone is cool now with creepy as shit, downright Google-level evil done to their browsing, email, likes, and every other form of data. This boat sailed long ago.

[andrewjoy]

In the modern world it is accepted that a company will have to store a certain amount of data on you for the services to work. My problem is two fold:

Lack of Transparency
Security Incompetence

If a company is going to store and collect data it needs to be much more clear what they are collecting or accessing why they are doing it and how long it will be stored for, not in a big long EULA because no matter what the legal boffins say nobody reads them. The new android permissions system is nice and clear, more services need to adapt this type of thing , a simple list of whats what , not 50 pages of legal mubo jumbo, then again i don't see this happening as if it was clear what they where doing , more people would tell them to get fucked.

Another issues is how they store the data , there are so many data breaches now companies really need to step up and secure data properly, no system can be secure 100% but storing data in plain text , not hashing and salting passwords or not using https is unacceptable in the current climate. I mean just look at the moonpig security issues http://www.ifc0nfig.com/moonpig-vulnerability/ , a concurrent user ID is bad enough , but using that as the security token in an app is a fundamental failure of security testing and how this type of stuff works, and they did not fix it for over a year even after it was shown to them...... that should be criminal negligence. But hey it makes it simple for the government to spy on you so they are not going to enforce anything like that, hell they would ban encryption if they could get away with it.

[Muirium]

The US Senate is literally trying to do precisely that. Only the Obama administration nixed them, for now. We're just one Republican president away from a hell of a fun internet where only outlaws have any security whatsoever!

[webwit]

Obama, Protector of Privacy.

[chuckdee]

Naturally I've never joined. Registration walls piss me off from the get go, as my rants about our good friends MassDrop might have mentioned a few times! .

Massdrop has reasoning that makes sense. Many places don't want their lower prices advertised on the Internet. See many other clubs for the same sort of activity. By having it behind a registration wall, they satisfy that requirement. The fact that they even have a way around it shows the reasoning well enough for me.

[Muirium]

Obama, Protector of Privacy.

Chilling, isn't it? [/wishitwasbrownfont]

[webwit]

Massdrop has reasoning that makes sense. Many places don't want their lower prices advertised on the Internet. See many other clubs for the same sort of activity. By having it behind a registration wall, they satisfy that requirement. The fact that they even have a way around it shows the reasoning well enough for me.

Massdrop is full of it. It's (like all those places) to monetize you and your data.

[chuckdee]

If it were Md, then why would they put a way around it?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[webwit]

It's a well-known strategy. Good PR, and only 1% use it, and most of those wouldn't not give their data anyway. The masses just give their data.

[Muirium]

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Sigh. I wonder what those wads are gathering on you, while they piss their name on our forum…

[seebart]

Unbenannt.JPG (71.8 KiB) Viewed 7784 times

[Muirium]

That's binding, legal advice if I ever heard it.

[andrewjoy]

LOl its along the same lines as " Its only a legal problem if they find out about it"

[chuckdee]

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Sigh. I wonder what those wads are gathering on you, while they piss their name on our forum…

Nothing. I never signed up for an account.

[Muirium]

Sure their app is playing fair? Browsers are the richest source for data mining of all. Google wouldn't bother making one if they weren't!

Anyway, I'm determined to nag all that sig spam of theirs right off our forum. That's the good cop approach! Bad cop is Webwit simply banning them.

[chuckdee]

Webwit has already said that the site is making money from it- so that doesn't seem likely to happen. And really? If someone had just brought it up to ask, you'd probably get a bit more of a positive reaction. But it's been anything but.

[Muirium]

I just checked Deskthority's PayPal: still nothing from Tapatalk. For the record, that makes a grand total of zero they have ever paid us.

To be fair, Webwit only sent them our PayPal details 10 days ago, but on the other side of the equation: did they ask or even warn us they'd be spamming our forum before they made that their app's default behaviour? Did they fuck.

Anyway, I have brought this up with our users before. The trouble is the kind of lazy half assery that lets spam slide is highly correlated with not giving a shit in general. I can keep on nagging (it's not easy to stop me once I'm started) but I doubt it'll have much effect. We probably need to get active about this.

[chuckdee]

Sure their app is playing fair? Browsers are the richest source for data mining of all. Google wouldn't bother making one if they weren't!

I don't browse using it.

An why all of the vitriol and effort over one line of text? Seems a very crappy ROI to put so much mindshare and effort into it. It would be different if it was links or images... but it's just text. Along the lines of that sent on my iphone signature that's on idevices.

[Halvar]

Is the Tapatalk interface of the forum software easy to deactivate? I don't see any reason to support them as long as they spam us. And why should we enter an advertising contract with them? We haven't been doing advertising in the forums before.

[seebart]

It should be said that most Tapatalk users are not aware of any of this. I did use it for quite a while until they spammed me with emails about my user profile without me chaning any settings. Only then did I start to take a closer look at their "service".

https://tapatalk.com/about-us.php

[chzel]

A lot of us use tapatalk, I'm writing this with it. The ads are shown on tapatalk's app, the signature issue is because by default tapatalk adds it, and users are too lazy to change it. Educate/punish the lazy ones, not the rest of us.

[seebart]

I tried "Forum Fiend", it's not as evolved as tapatalk.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthr ... ?t=2733755

I have not tried forum runner:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... orumrunner

[Halvar]

@chzel: I see. Do you have to change the option once, or do you have to deactivate it by hand for every post?

[chzel]

Just once.