Or do you mean imply that a practical approach to reign in unregulated online casinos is to spread the message of, "Just Say No," in web forum comments to the ostensible addicts?

Or to be fair, something else entirely? My point is I can't tell without context there whether you are sympathizing with the user ("ah yes, something needs to be done because they've found your weak spot"), or chastising them for not having the force of will to resist dark patterns.

Edit: clarification

If you agreed to sharing all your contacts to listen to “musical tweets”, I don’t see why you’ll be complaining. You willingly made a trade off.

I know more about coding than 95% of my friends and I still don't fully understand the depth of info that I transmit to an app when I agree to give it permissions on my iOS device.

E.g., if I give Whatsapp access to my photos on my iPhone, does that mean all of the photos that are stored on my iPhone, including screenshots and hidden photos, are uploaded to Whatsapp servers? Does it upload when I take a new photo or when I open the Whatsapp app?

So if, in this case, Whatsapp is indeed pulling all of a user's photos, including hidden photos, to their servers, I imagine many people would not want that to happen. So 1) I'd want to know ahead of time exactly what will be pulled and 2) ideally, I could have a way to use the app without giving it the keys to everything.

“Oh noes I had to give up all of my contact’s personal information... but I got into that beta!!”

I have heard there's a way to share invites without sharing contacts, but I haven't cared enough to even do a cursory search on that.

So we can share the list, but they'll never get our real contacts, only trash data. Enough use it, maybe they'll stop

The next move on this side would be to keep contacts in a separate app from the std Android/Apple app, and then have to make calls, texts, etc. from there.

If only there weren't so many sociopaths running these companies... sorry, wrong planet

Signal does it with hashes which it doesn’t store anyway

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007061452-Do...

HN seems to be doing pretty well, and it's never done this sort of thing, as far as I know.

Reddit never did it during their growth phase, instead they provided their own seed content.

Metafilter has never done anything unethical to my knowledge.

There are many, many successful social networks which have not performed unethical contact harvesting and other shady things.

I don’t know any one outside some geeky sites and only one person personally who cares about any of this. Some do say lame casually. But it’s not going to be a deciding factor for using the app.

—

To add on to the whims of the geeky communities. Some companies escape it more than others. Airbnb doesn’t get much shit for spamming Craigslist people in early days. Compared to the negative talk of Uber, Facebook, etc, they also get no where near any criticism for the way they incentivize negative aspects of their platform.

—

All of this to say - there’s no real downside if money and power is the primary goal.

My experience is completely different from yours. Out of the dozens of people I've spoken with about this stuff, I can't remember a SINGLE PERSON who didn't express dissatisfaction with at least one of: lack of privacy and potential willy-nilly snooping by CompanyX employee; arbitrary blocking and post removal without good cause; bad interface design; low quality of content.

I don't go fishing for it either, it just happens in conversation, although I sometimes am the first to broach the subject of social networks.

So I see the same dissatisfaction. I find that to be closer to slacktivism level of caring for most people though. If they stop using an app or don't use it from the get go for X reason, it usually doesn't align with how they're using other apps. So technically they did not use something because of the dissatisfaction you described. However, they aren't actually applying that even remotely consistently.

That because they have a lot of VC money riding on it, they have to do "growth hacking" in order to justify the funds and grow quickly enough to satisfy the investors?

Well, I guess I have to agree.

Hacker News doesn’t have the same business model as others either. It’s to help the namesake incubator. It succeeds with that. Getting contacts etc wouldn’t benefit Hacker News. Hacker News could lose a decent amount of money yearly without any prospect of breaking even and still be run.

Most other apps of any kind can’t be run that way, including Reddit and Metafilter.

With today's technology, you can spin up a community website for, e.g. your family or your organization for the price of basic Web hosting and have all the perks of connecting without the downsides of e.g. your data being harvested and reviewed by anyone at CompanyX.

Sure, you have to do your own security, but the big social networks aren't impervious either. And you gain the advantage of not having your account randomly disabled or spamfiltered or shadowbanned.

It won't protect you from NSA or FBI, but I don't think most people care about that. On the other hand, people I've spoken with are aware and do care about snooping by CompanyX employees.

The more I think about it, even as writing this comment, the more I can see that we are very close to rapid disruption in the social network space.

On the other hand, the number of people I know who are either deathly afraid or just normally afraid of the government and its agencies like the ones you mentioned is high. This is definitely going to be a minority of people. My family and extended family aren't common cases.

I don't see either as big deals though. Not enough to have people not stick with bigger apps that have network appeal.

I don't believe disruption of anything but more of the same in different clothing happening. I'm a pessimist though.

I might have given them permission without realizing it, but what could've also happened is that they saw my phone number in someone else's contact list, and assumed we were contacts.

I refuse to use tooling from shitbags who try to exort me into compromising others' privacy for shiny toys.

I know other shops do it, as if that makes it OK.

Do we give CH the benefit of the doubt =p ?

In any case, I also hope (and expect) Apple to implement better controls for sharing contacts.

EDIT: Typo

Surely Apple knows this, but is allowing it because... it's mega-popular?

What's the point of having rules if clawing your way to popularity by leveraging their violation is deemed permissible?

I keep buying into the Apple ecosystem because of their stance on user privacy. Sure, they aren't perfect; but they are miles ahead of there competitors.

Social conventions are always stronger than the law; at least in person.

This, among other reasons, is why I never give out the number of my SIM card, or my residential address, et c, to anyone. They're just going to click "allow" and give it to a thousand shady companies, starting with Facebook.

I never give people data I don't want stored in my shadow profile.

As Eben Moglen puts it, privacy is ecological, not transactional.

See http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartIII.html

1. Disable contacts for all your configured accounts 2. Add a dummy Gmail account, enable contacts. 3. Add invitee to dummy account 4. Give contacts access to Clubhouse 5. Send invite 6. Remove contact access 7. enable contacts disabled in 1

Clubhouse is pretty shit, really. So I sold my soul and got nothing in return.

I have similar feelings about the product, but am curious to hear your reasons in detail first if you'll share them.

Trivialities aside, the content is not for me. It's either some self-help thing or a get rich fast scheme. And I don't care about either.

Worse though is the content delivery. They talk so much and say so little. Horrible.

It really is this:

> Clubhouse is C tier people listening to B tier people talk about A tier people

And here I am, a D tier person not wanting to be part of this circlejerk.

I noticed the app icon as well. I wondered who it was, but didn’t look into it.

I’m in agreement about the content.

The “entrepreneurship” culture on Clubhouse seems to be either VC / media worship or this hustle thing.

I joined a "Real Estate Money" group that was pitching $500 investments in shared AirBnB properties. It had calling cards of a scammy “investment” group. A mix of cheerleading and leadership-enriching sales to suckers.

I spent some time last night in some social groups and while entertaining from a sort of shock value perspective they were not well moderated. They would not work with bigger audiences.

Andrew Sorkin interviewed Bill Gates on Clubhouse on Friday. My eyes widened when I saw that, I questioned my initial assessment of the product and it’s velocity. Then I realized I was thinking of Aaron Sorkin. Andrew is some mainstream media journalist. I doubt Gates gave a hoot about the medium.

I think VC, media and “influencers” all slept on TikTok and are now overcompensating with involvement on Clubhouse. It’s better suited to them anyway, and it matches the atmosphere of conferences.

It is the type of activity PG labeled “playing house” and is perhaps well suited as a stand in for puffery, fakery and “influence.”

Regarding content delivery, it is like you read my mind. I’d describe Clubhouse content, even purportedly serious stuff, as awash in loquaciousness word salad.

Clubhouse content forces listeners to be beholden to linear progression. So you lost the most valuable thing about audio content found in podcasts: editing and people who have developed the skills to be engaging.

Clubhouse lacks the crucial “trick play” of podcasts, where you can option out of minutes of content (and ads) at any time.

So anyhow, I regret sharing the address book with them and took my lumps ITT for admitting as much.

However, I don’t regret trying it. Critically evaluating nascent platforms and technology is what I do.

Funny, when I read that, my eyes equally widened, until your next sentence corrected the interviewer’s name in my head.

I believe Andrew runs DealBook on the NY Times, but I’m curious how the interview was conducted?

Bill Gates is on record some years ago, saying that “no iPhone for me” when asked if he used an iPhone. This was around the time Windows Phone lost the mobile market to iOS and Android, and since ClubHouse is iOS-only, I’m wondering how Gates was able to take part, unless he’s changed his mind since he was asked that question.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/

is there a list of known existing "big brother" apps ? or is it just as good to look at app permissions to figure this out ?

https://twitter.com/styfle/status/1358186671007760385

Fake/mock GPS (w/o telling the app that it's fake unlike what Android does), fake contacts etc.

How is this GDPR compliant?

You don't need to share contacts in order to get invited, like you don't have to do it to use the platform. You have to do it to invite others (like your friend that you told about Clubhouse) after you are already on the platform, so that is not regulated by GDPR.

It is a shitty user experience and I also want Apple to control this at the OS level. Let me select which contacts if I want to do it at all.

It isn't, really, but the question whom to prosecute is complicated. Clubhouse gets the contact list data from you, the user. Usually, somewhere in the ToS, there is a little thing where you confirm to have the right to share all the data you share with Clubhouse. That means that first and foremost, you as a user are responsible.

If you are a non-commercial user using Clubhouse from your private phone, what you do with your private contacts isn't covered by GDPR, private stuff is an exception. However, as consumer, European legislation protects you from surprising and unusual terms, which this might be. Legislation might also protect all your contacts. However, this is a question that still needs to be litigated in court, and I don't remember any decisions around that problem (WhatsApp basically has the same constellation).

If you are a commercial user, because this is your work phone and your contacts are colleagues, business partners, customers, things are quite different. You are, as a data processor, responsible for how you pass on your contact list. You better make sure that you are allowed to do that (because you have a GDPR-compliant reason like legal obligation, contractual obligation with your customer, assent or legitimate interest) and that your contacts have been informed about what you are doing beforehand. Also, you then need a written contract with Clubhouse about the data being passed along, about how it will be used and protected, etc. Also, passing along the contacts to Clubhouse must be necessary for a predetermined, well-defined reason that can be considered more important than your contacts' right to privacy.

So as a private person, you might get away with using Clubhouse. As a company, employee, self-employed, state official, whatever, you are probably in hot water, because surely you didn't do all the required things. But for Clubhouse this might not be a problem, because as current case law stands (imho, iirc, ianal, ...) Clubhouse isn't the party that did something wrong there.

So even if you are at fault, I can't imagine that would help them a lot, if some data protection authority looked into this.

I recommend having a look over the Wikipedia page on the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...

That's called colonialism, and Europe is supposed to have given it up.

But, as I see it, EU is protecting its citizens. If you want to do business with EU citizens you must abide by EU regulations. It's that simple. I don't get how this came to be all of a sudden about colonialism. Any business is free to stay out of EU.

Do you think the EU laws should apply to people selling things to EU citizens while they are on vacation in other parts of the world? If someone from Germany travels to Brazil and buys something from a store, are they required to abide by EU rules?

If someone from the EU leaves the EU digitally to buy something in another country, it isn't up to the seller to enforce EU rules.

Unless you have an entity (either yourself or your business) under EU jurisdiction, you don't have to follow their rules.

While these solutions may be incomplete, or imperfect, having none is definitely worse.

> If someone from the EU leaves the EU digitally to buy something in another country, it isn't up to the seller to enforce EU rules.

> Unless you have an entity (either yourself or your business) under EU jurisdiction, you don't have to follow their rules.

Please _do_ read the link I already posted in a previous comment [0]. It clarifies many things, but I don't want to paste too much content here.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...

If I am a US citizen living and working in the US, and break the GDPR by storing data illegally from visitors to my website from the EU, the EU can certainly try to fine me or issue a summons or whatever they want to do.

However, there exists no extradition treaty for this law, and there would be no way for the EU to enforce judgement.

http://slawsonandslawson.com/article-32-the-hole-in-the-gdpr...

No, no more than if I want to do business with Saudis I'm liable for punishment if I drink a beer.

I urge you to read this, it should clarify things:

Applicability outside of the European Union:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...

http://slawsonandslawson.com/article-32-the-hole-in-the-gdpr...

https://tinyletter.com/mbutterick/letters/you-re-not-the-bos...

https://www.congress.gov/treaty-document/108th-congress/27

For example, that's what the US is using on Kim Dotcom.

That's not even getting into international pressure levers.

I don't know that we've seen any of those kinds of actions yet, but they're clearly on the table if a company breaking the rules became a real "problem".

The thing is, if you're just completely avoiding doing any business with the EU, having any EU customers or users, and just not touching the EU with a 1000 mile pole and avoiding the GDPR in such a fashion - well, then there's no reason to go after you. The legislation has done its job.

In other words, the EU can attempt to extend its internet regulations over the rest of the world by implementing a China-style firewall. Well, we'll see if that happens.

Here’s a case example, BNP Paribas dealings with sanctioned countries. https://www.wsj.com/articles/bnp-agrees-to-pay-over-8-8-bill...

https://www.privacyshield.gov/welcome

Why any US company would voluntarily agree to this is beyond me, unless one of its EU customers insisted on it.

Here’s a lawyer’s take on this: https://tinyletter.com/mbutterick/letters/you-re-not-the-bos...

Would you like to be a test case for us?

I'd be extremely interested for a company who doesn't operate in the EUs being brought to court and what other countries are willing to help the EU exercise those judgements if any.

On a side note, Germans are obsessed with Clubhouse.

People tend to forget that it is not applicable. For instance nothing I build will ever comply to it regardless of users that might be in europe

Clubhouse has no duty to obey european law

The question is: why do you think the need to be compliant?

For the same reason WhatsApp's new T&Cs don't really change anything for EU users.

However I don't think the collection of contacts is actually illegal under GDPR, considering WhatsApp does exactly this too. And it's huge in Europe, much bigger than in the US. if they haven't gone after WhatsApp for this, they will probably not do so for Clubhouse.

Just like I don't have to comply if I have EU users on a service, I am in the united stated. europe cannot enforce their laws here. It's just the same as if saudia arabia tried to enforce their laws here. They carry no wait

That is what makes the GDPR insignificant. It applies to Europe. Not the rest of the world. The cookie warnings for the vast majority of the internet are stupid an unnecessary

So call it illegal in europe but who cares?

It honestly is maddening how many people care about the GDPR that don't need to

Anyway the EU says it applies but I agree they don't really have much in the way of enforcement capability with companies that have no presence here. Though they could ask Apple/Google to remove it from the store I suppose.

And of course most companies do have a presence here. All multinationals do, and even the smaller ones. Even if it's just a sales office.