I'm not sure how this reasoning works. Some company making money using your information isn't with intent to hurt an individual, generally speaking. It's rare that such an opportunity even exists.
Get put in a filter bubble? Have your government track you for protesting? Get on the wrong side of grey market price discrimination? Have your access to data and websites revoked?
Parties to a transaction that have no power don't come out ahead.
> To the extent that the individual and the marketer's interests are not aligned, the harm is borne entirely by the individual. It doesn't matter if the intention is to harm the individual
Of course it does. That's the claim. Don't bring up tangential subjects and then try to associate them as if it's a rephrasing.
There's a reason both murder and manslaughter are crimes.
Facebook hurting you might be because they want the money, but they specifically choose to make money by hurting you, and society. [2][3]
So in the end I don't think it is wrong to phrase it that way. Someone beating you up in exchange for money still has the goal of beating you up.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psycholog...
[2]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03007995.2021.1...
[3]: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/social-media-news%20consumpt...
Just because you don't know how much your data is worth, and may not even know the crime happened, doesn't make it not a crime or not harmful.
Consider voyeurs who take upskirt photos. Even though the victim may never know that data was stolen, it's undeniable that it's an invasion of privacy and often a criminal offence.
I can get the former largely without the latter. I am concerned when a random app has access to the latter because they feel entitled to collect it by virtue of installation.
Because it’s not actually yours and you didn’t create it. It’s about you which is a critical difference.
If you connect to a web server and it records a standard access log of a timestamp that it received a request from a given IP address, that’s data 100% generated by the server. That’s not “your data” any more than a recording from a surveillance camera at a gas station you frequent is “your video”.
They don't take it. The value of your information is either inherent (is all information inherently valuable somehow?) or in how it can be used. There is no information "staked claim" as with a natural resource. If you don't have the infrastructure and relationships, you can't monetize it... similar to natural resources. Maybe there should be an individual "staked claim" (which is what the GDPR mostly does), but arguing as if it's a given because "I should be able to make money and nobody else should" is not compelling. This is why there are so few laws regarding it and there's the inherent quasi-legal issue of tracking someone's "staked claim" without tracking them.
The Mercer family didn't personally want to kill, imprison, or cripple a bunch of people, but that's certainly what they achieved with their opiod business.
I mean, grandma isn't going to figure this out on her own. She is happy to have a way to get in touch with her grandchildren and has no idea she is being exploited.
I’m not sure there’s any explanation other than more ad/data revenue.
Are there apps that give superior experience than web sites nowadays? Even not accounting for privacy, the apps are generally just shittier with less functionality.
I used to give the Google apps as examples of apps being better, but the gmail app is more buggy than just using gmail in a mobile browser, not to mention the integrated phone mail app.
Similar, there’s quite a few chat/video apps and games where apps make sense. And none of them prompted me to download the app or show lies like “better in our app” crap.
If you can simulate 5 different phones it won`t matter if someone gets their spyware onto one of them.
But it is always better to address the root cause of the problem. This often means a policy or legal issue rather than a technical, but has the advantage of not becoming a whack-a-mole technical race.
The IMDB app is far better (to me) than the dumpster-fire that has become their website. Other than that, I agree with the sentiment that most apps for websites are not worthwhile to install.
Funny, to me the IMDB app is the perfect example of a dumpster-fire app, with every 3rd tap/action resulting in an “invitation” to sign up for an account.
I use a text-only browser and write simple command line "apps" (scripts) to retrieve text from sites like IMDB. It works very well. Opening pages on these sites in a "modern" web browser is an entirely different experience. We cannot ignore the complicity of the "modern" web browser in degrading the "user experience" in cases like this one.
Example:
# Don't forget the trailing fwd slash else 302 redirect
echo https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9484998/ | 1.sh 280 > 1.html
firefox ./1.html
case $# in 1);;*)echo "usage: echo URL | $0 size";exec echo size options are 140 210 280;esac;
read x;case $x in https://m.imdb.com/title/*/);;*)exec echo error: URL \(should end with fwd slash\);esac;
x1=$(echo "$x"|cut -d/ -f5);
curl -H"User-Agent" -0 -4o "${x1}" "$x";
(grep -o "<title>.*</title>" "${x1}"|sed 's/ */ /g';
echo "<h3>Image size: $1</h3>";
(exec grep -o "title-cast-item__actor\"[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's>.*href=><a href=\"https://www.imdb.com>;s/?ref.*\"/\"/;s[.*[<p>&</a><\/p>['|nl -s,
exec grep -o "title-cast-item__actor[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's/.*>//;s/.*/<img alt=\"&\"[^\>]\*/'|grep -of /dev/stdin "${x1}" \
|case $1 in ---////////////////////////---IMDb-CAST-PHOTOS-ONLY---\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\---)
;;140)cut -d\" -f1-2,7-8,15|sed 's[.*[<p>&/></p>['
;;210)cut -d ' ' -f1-3,9|sed 's/https:/src=\"&/;s[.*[<p>&\"/></p>['
;;280)cut -d/ -f1-2,18-21|cut -d\" -f1-3,8|sed 's/class=\"/src=\"/;s/\.jpg/&\"/;s/ 280w//;s[.*[<p>&/></p>['
esac|nl -s,;
exec grep -o "title-cast-item__char\"[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's/.*cast-item-characters-link..//;s/.*/<p>\"&\"<\/p>/'|nl -s,;
))|sort -n|cut -d, -f2-
rm "${x1}" 2>/dev/null;I can see why GPS based apps, or camera apps with filters, or networking apps 'need' to be installed apps (I don't know if an easy way to do GPS through a browser; speed and fast access to storage) ... but Amazon, Reddit, newspapers, ... what am I gaining?
Genuine question as a one time web dev I've always considered web sites written as an app, shipped with a browser, to be a negative. What am I missing out on?
Like seriously; compare your comment to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27348626 . You just so happen to be weird: that's all.
What a letdown...
> What a letdown...
The original iPhone demo showed the actual desktop version of the NYT website loading in Safari. Websites were the ones that later optimized for mobile.
And I don’t remember iPhones being promoted as giving websites anything approaching native app capabilities except when Apple tried to sell that line to developers before they had a public SDK. Nobody bought it, even then.
For example, I worked on a rich text editor, and we wanted to put a bar with text formatting tools above the touch keyboard. This is not possible in the browser: your webapp cannot measure the keyboard or the remaining available viewport (and the keyboard's size depends on the input method and the iPhone model).
Another example I experienced is when we wanted to have full-screen dialogs with buttons at the bottom. If you do that, then the users have to tap your buttons twice, because the first tap only expands Safari's browser UI, and your buttons near the bottom of the screen only work while that UI is expanded.
I haven't made an app (don't know how!) and I definitely wouldn't add a "download our app or else!" banner/wall, but I've been extremely surprised from the other side of the table to see just how many users seemingly just want an app for an app's sake, even if it's functionally no different from a responsive mobile view.
Freelancers are cheap if you hire from poor countries.
Things like weather (with or without current coarse location), sports scores, headline news benefit from up to the minute data fetches, but older data is still useful.
For communication apps, often people would like notifications on inbound messages, so that can fit with web push apis to get data; but if you don't want notifications, you can't consistently make messages available to read offline.
1) Shortcut on the homescreen by simply tapping 1 button(install) instead of hoping that the user will somehow remember you. WebApp shortcuts are quite involved.
2) Sign in once with a forever session. I hate apps where I need to sign in again because having an App is a great opportunity to have one time sign in that runs through generations of phone upgrades. Even better, the sign in doesn't have to involve the user, the data will be there and not accidentally deleted which means that the presence of the app is as good as username and password.
3) Immersive experience means better user experience. The UI becomes part of the Phone's UI instead of another App's UI's sub UI. A well designed app is very effective. I haven't seen a well designed mobile Web App, Web is great for websites and "possible to do" Mobile Web Apps.
4) Smaller download sizes, faster launches. A website would usually download a few MB of scripts and images, an App without bloated frameworks would be easily around that size and will download it only once. It will be ready to use in less than 0.5s every time.
5) Any advanced stuff is done much better natively even if it is possible to do through the browser. This is because the browser put extra boundaries around the boundaries that has due to the OS boundaries.
I know the reasoning of that statement but it's not providing an argument to refute. What am I supposed to say? "No. You can't, that's why it's not happening".
1) You can add websites as app icons to iOS and Android. 2) Websites can hold persistent identities, and devices can otherwise remember the login details. 3) Websites UI can be anything and have nearly all options that apps can have, depending on the quality of the UX, which depends on the designer in any case. 4) A professional website will not be any slower if properly designed.
Now on 5, that depends on the specifics of the app. Some types do benefit greatly from being boarded on a device. An example would be Procreate for instance, which can not be mimicked on par in webform.
2) Websites do that through Cookies and Local Storage. These have limits and users would be purging them en mass. The data of the app doesn't disappear for no reason.
3) As I said, the problem is that it runs within a browser if not added to the homescreen. It is a window within a window.
4) Professional or amateur design, websites data is managed by the browser and not you. Caches get invalidated, you download everything again. It happens all the time.
Just being able to do something is not enough, Apps are much smoother experience.
I also cannot bookmark pages from apps. I can, however, add websites to the home-screen. I don't see any reason to download fat binaries for a worse experience.
Are you an app developer? You seem to be very biased.
BTW, I’m not talking about websites(articles and forms) but Web apps(task achieving experiences). Of course it’s just as bad experience to have a website as an app. it’s even worse when you are being forced to.
Though, (1) is wrong on iPhone; there’s an “add to home screen” action in the share menu.
As I said:
>WebApp shortcuts are quite involved.
Most people don't know about that functionality, you need to teach them. It would have been cool if Apple supported that, then I guess everyone would have been trying trick you into it like the good old days where every website was trying to trick you into making it you start page.
I am as cynical about forcing apps down user's throats as anyone (Reddit, I'm looking at you), but the downvotes are a bit too much when this is a perfectly reasonable point, no?
Some cases for apps are perfectly legitimate, maybe the access to the phone APIs and the native experience is much better for a given product or service. I'm a firm believer in PWAs but as it stands I really prefer Uber or delivery apps to be native.
I really hope the people downvoting the parent comment are not the same people who are staunchly against web apps, though I suspect there will be some intersection. We can't have web apps, but we can't have native apps either... What can we have then, Geocities and MySpace?
The expectation is 'everyone wants you to use their app so they can track and advertise better' and the parent basically said 'nuh-uh'. We need more to be able to consider it substantive and benefiting the conversation, IMO.
and it is possible to do it with apps if we shift to apps being a service for the user, rather than a service for the developers sponsors
> Makes me very wary even of dumbphones
If you care about it, consider GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone, which run FLOSS and have hardware kill switches for microphone and other things.
Last time I checked in with the Librem project, the phone was completely unusable as a phone because the power management and in particular the sleep mode wasn't working properly. Sometimes the phone would wake up from sleep, and since the power management was buggy it would blow through the entire battery charge in an hour.
So essentially you'd need a backup phone for your Librem 5 because you never know if it'll be dead when you need to call 911.
In my country all phones must have permission from the government to operate, and the phone manufacturer that need to ask this permission in first place, any phone detected by cell towers that aren't one of them, can be legally banned from the network (not just YOUR phone, but all identical model phones!)
On modern Android versions, there's some serious limitations on apps running in the background at all. In most cases, if you want your app to run in the background, you gotta put up a notification that is displayed the whole time that background service is running.
Oh and also. Scanning for bluetooth devices is a fairly battery-consuming activity as far as I can tell.
Whatever the opinion on tracking, Google definitely carves out their own moats and are hypocritical in a lot of respects. Arguably pushing changes to hurt their small competition given they have better/more pervasive personalized tracking without the low hanging fruit.
Unfortunately they went so hard on dumbphone specs that it ran poorly, kept crashing all the time because it kept running out of ram. (it had 256mb of RAM I believe, or 128, don't remember, one of the two).
And now that so many of us leave BT on all the time for our BT earbuds and airpods, I'd assume it's become better at tracking, not worse
How can we teach it to them?
How did you think for example notifications were pushed to Bluetooth smart watches?
Presumably only Android works like this?
By which you mean Google, Microsoft and Apple?
>Apple, Google & Microsoft Have Teamed up to Block the Right-to-Repair Law
https://wccftech.com/apple-google-microsoft-team-up-to-stop-...
I wonder what fraction
I mean, I know that adtech spy on us a lot, but I didn't knew for example that using Bluetooth while the app is shut down was possible.
Makes me very wary even of dumbphones, for example I bought a dumbphone recently, and yet it came with Facebook and Google Assistant both pre-installed.