iOS 11's Misleading "Off-Ish" Setting for Radios Is Bad for User Security

Re:iOS 11's Misleading "Off-Ish" Setting for Radios Is Bad f... by _jal on Friday October 06, 2017 @10:18AM (#15416954)

> At this point I’m not sure there’s a need for normal users to actually turn off Wi-Fi.

Define 'normal'. After I educated my (retired, nontechnical) mother about wifi and bluetooth tracking, she started turning them off when she left the house.

I think the folks who think this is just peachy are in their own bubble. 'Normal' (by my working definition) people do care about this stuff if they understand it. Thankfully, Apple gets this stuff right-ish more often than not, but in this case, I think they blew it.

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Re:iOS 11's Misleading "Off-Ish" Setting for Radios Is Bad f... by MBCook on Friday October 06, 2017 @10:44AM (#15417146)

Apple must have statistics about this (from people who opt in to it like me).

If they made this change I imagine the number of people who actually toggle the radios on and off a lot (manually, not airplane mode) must be very small.

I’m sure th know how many people have written them about the ‘I ran up my cellular bill and it’s your fault’ thing too. I know I’ve heard that from people.

It’s a change from what it’s been doing for 10 years but I think it makes sense.

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Re:iOS 11's Misleading "Off-Ish" Setting for Radios Is Bad f... by _jal on Saturday October 07, 2017 @02:19PM (#15424940)

You indirectly raise an interesting point - I wonder by how much Apple's feedback stats on these topics are biased.

Folks who worry about, say, wifi and bluetooth walk-buy surveillance are going to be much more likely to opt-out of just about anything they can, including usage instrumentation. So of course they'll be underrepresented in statistics generated from that data.

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