Honestly, kudos. The rules should apply to the ones foisting this system upon us as well. This is probably the only way to make anyone in power reconsider current setup.
<< As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd.
And people laughed at Red Reddington when he said he had no email.
It was some years ago and resulted in nothing
Unless your problem is with the company doing the privacy violations, this doesn’t make any sense.
They probably outsource processing the data and storing it to other entities, but that will be under contracts which govern how the data may be used and handled. I assume that's not what "sell the data" means in this conversation.
It would be such an egregious violation of local data protection law to sell patient personal details for unrestricted commercial use, including their contact info, and it would make the political news where I live if they were found out.
I have access to ... zero patient data. Our entire test database is synthetic records.
EU law means little in this respect, since it's not enforced and most people don't understand enough on the subject to even evaluate what's going on with their data (or their clients data).
Plus its highly amoral and doctors here are still coming from idealistic breed that wanted to help people, those 2 are practically exclusive.
Interesting thought policing you have in there.
It's formulated so that they can give those contacts away rather than sell them, but only to the rest of the medical goods & services supplychain that are involved in your care, who are also bound by HIPAA.
The worst dark pattern this has generated so far seems to be pharmaceutical company drug reps bribing your doctor to change what they would prescribe you.
The worst that's likely to happen without regulation, as far as I can tell, involves an associated provider just leaking UnitedHealthcare's full database of every patient and every condition.
It's genuinely sad that this level of Cold War paranoia has been normalized again.
I recently noticed that a fraction of the "vendors" allow deselecting the "legitimate interest" but have the "consent" tick box marked and unmodifiable.
Consider the following page:
https://www.brighthub.com/environment/renewable-energy/artic...
The following vendors have un-deselectable "consent" tickboxes:
Skimbit Ltd
Confiant Inc.
Lumen Research Limited
Visarity Technologies GmbH
DoubleVerify Inc.
Revcontent, LLC
Adssets AB
Integral Ad Science (incorporating ADmantX)
Mirando GmbH & Co KG
Polar Mobile Group Inc.
Rockabox Media Ltd
Telecoming S.A.
Seenthis AB
HUMAN
Papirfly AS
NEXD
One Tech Group GmbH
illuma technology limited
CHEQ AI TECHNOLOGIES
Adjust Digital A/S
VRTCAL Markets Inc
Cavai AS
Kiosked Ltd
Protected Media LTD
Oracle Data Cloud - Moat
Bannernow, Inc.
Jetpack Digital LLC
GeoEdge
Ensighten
IVO Media Ltd
Online Media Solutions LTD
Mobkoi Ltd
Redbranch, Inc dba Fraudlogix
Alphalyr SAS
Silverbullet Data Services Group
Stream Eye OOD
adbalancer Werbeagentur GmbH
Somplo Ltd
Velocity Made Good LLC
Vyde Ltd.
Adelaide Metrics Inc
Sqreem Technologies Private Limited
TMT Digital Inc
dpa-infocom GmbH
Brandhouse/Subsero A/S
streaMonkey GmbH
Alkimi
Zeit Agency ApS
Sitewit, Corp
AccountInsight Ltd
Aderize, Inc.
fraud0 GmbH
Channel99, Inc.
Videobot Ltd
Appstock LTD.
Dando online LTD
EMBRACE Systems GmbH
Hiili SL
YIELDBIRD SP. Z O.O.
Volentio JSD Limited
BEAPUP SOLUTIONS LTD
Public Good Software Inc.
Kidoz Inc.
DataDome SA
Sarigato Sp. z o.o.
Gesher Software LTD dba bridgeupp
Playdigo Inc
Sipo Inc
EliteAppgrade
SpinX Pte Ltd
Creatopy INC
Codevelop Technologies GmbH
Adgrid Media, LLC
ProgrammaticX LTD
Nitrouppi LTD
9 Dots Media Ltd
Vudoo Pty Ltd
Mobavenue Media Pvt Ltd
Carbonatix LTD
2) Are these even legal under GDPR rules?
3) Does this not nullify arguments by certain 3 letter agencies that users "consent" to their tracking?
4) Who is behind these companies? Any idea on how to approach this from an investigative journalism angle? Can we figure out the headquarters, employee counts, CEO's of these companies?
5) If "undeselectable consent tickboxes" qualify as legally valid consent, doesn't this set a precedent to foist off miryads of types of lack of consent as "consent"? Will this enable legalizing rape? Where does this Pandora's box end? How is this any different from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fQsrwBi2Jo
6) As far as I understand, an illegal contract is void. If the forms submitted by users contained undeselectable "consent tickboxes"; then the forms no longer constitute legal contracts. Observe that this is regardless of the preferences of all the other tickboxes: even if users were to lazy to deselect all the deselectable tickboxes, the mere presence of deselectable tickboxes voids these forms as contracts. This means that all the other vendors didn't receive any consent, since their specific submitted form-as-a-contract is void, even if the majority of the vendors had consent tickboxes that could be deselected. It would seem prudent for such companies to insist that the forms don't contain undeselectable tickboxes for any companies since it would nullify the consent they hope to receive.
No. And nobody cares.
about posting any results: I assume you are aware that after some time it is no longer possible to add comments to a HN discussion, I assume you will post any progress as a HN submission?
Did you call to complain about the termination?
I feel somewhat vindicated after this announcement (though it does nothing to bring my account back):
https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/cfpb-fines-block-175m...
> Accessing any kind of customer service for Cash App was a challenge, too, according to the CFPB. Block included a customer service number on Cash App cards and in the app's Terms of Service, but calling it would it ultimately lead users to "a pre-recorded message directing consumers to contact customer support through the app."
>As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd.
Fortunately this is changing with iOS 18 with "limited contacts" sharing.
https://mobiledevmemo.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/image.p...
The interface also seems specifically designed to push people to allow only a subset of contacts, rather than blindly clicking "allow all".
The far bigger issue is the contact info you share with online retailers. Scraping contact info through apps is very visible, drawing flak from the media and consumers. Most of the time all you get is a name (could be a nickname), and maybe some combination of phone/email/address, depending on how diligent the person in filling out all the fields. On the other hand placing any sort of order online requires you to provide your full name, address, phone number, and email address. You can also be reasonably certain that they're all accurate, because they're plausibly required for delivery/billing purposes. Such data can also be surreptitiously fed to data brokers behind the scenes, without an obvious "tiktok would like access to your contacts" modal.
I also see the shenanigans of adding new 'privacy' settings and setting them open by default. Another typical Microsoft ploy by the way.
Previously they’d take your LinkedIn password and try using that to log in to your email account to grab your contacts.
And I kinda get it, some services external to your bank can help you manage your finances etc. But it's why banks should offer APIs where the user can set limited and timed access to these services. In Europe this is PSD2 (Revised Payment Services Directive).
In light of that, perhaps reevaluate their ATT efforts as far less about meaningful privacy and far more about stealing $10B a year or so from Facebook.
A perfectly privacy respecting app store isn't going to do any good if it doesn't have any apps. Just look at f-droid. Most (all?) of the apps there might be privacy respecting, but good luck getting any of the popular apps (eg. facebook, tiktok, google maps) on there.
>In light of that, perhaps reevaluate their ATT efforts as far less about meaningful privacy and far more about stealing $10B a year or so from Facebook.
What would make you think Apple's pro-privacy changes aren't "about stealing $10B a year or so from Facebook"? At least some people are willing to pay for more privacy, and pro-changes hurts advertisers, so basically any pro-privacy change can be construed as "less about meaningful privacy and far more about stealing".
That makes sense, considering they’re not privacy respecting.
40 years ago apps were sold on floppy disks. 30 years ago they were sold on CD-ROMs. 20 years ago, DVDs.
Online-only apps are a recent thing. A privacy respecting app store certainly can be a thing. Apps being blocked or banned from stores for choosing to not respect your privacy is a good thing.
I'm not sure you're trying say. I specifically acknowledged the existence of f-droid as a "privacy respecting app store" in the quoted comment.
>Apps choosing to not respect your privacy, and being blocked or banned from stores, is a good thing.
"a good thing" doesn't mean much when most people haven't even heard of your app store, and are missing out on all the popular apps that people want. Idealism doesn't mean much when nobody is using it. Apple might not be the paragon of privacy, but they had a greater impact on user privacy than f-droid ever will. To reiterate OP's point: what's the point of having a perfectly private OS and app store, when there's no apps for it, and your normie friends/relatives are going to sell you out anyways by uploading their entire contact list and photos (both with you in it) to google and meta?
Sorry, that's nonsensical, unless you mean a negative impact. Apple's privacy is pretend only, as this article makes quite clear.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
This wording is actually a lot weaker than I remember it back when I wrote iOS apps. The developer also was not allowed to exit the app or close it against the user’s intent, however I can’t find that rule anymore.
> For example, if a user declines to share Location, offer the ability to manually enter an address.
This is a reasonable ability, but I think that the operating system should handle it anyways. When it asks for permission for your location, in addition to "allow" and "deny", you can select "manually enter location" and "custom" (the "custom" option would allow the user to specify their own program for handling access to that specific permission (or to simulate error conditions such as no signal); possibly the setting menu can have an option for "show advanced options" before "custom" will be displayed, if you think it would otherwise make it too complicated).
> that include the ability to post photos to a social network must not also require microphone access before allowing the user to upload photos
This is reasonable, that apps should not be allowed to require microphone access for such a thing.
However, sometimes a warning message makes sense but then to allow it anyways even if permission is not granted; e.g. for a video recording program, it might display a message about "Warning: microphone permission is not allowed for this app; if you proceed without enabling the microphone permission, the audio will not be recorded." Something similar would also apply if you denied camera permission but allowed microphone permission; in that case, only audio will be recorded. It might refuse to work if both permissions are denied, though.
It's kind of weird that Apple introduced this big fat tracking consent popup, but they don't really do anything to actually prevent cross-app tracking...
I'm always wondering why these idiots force the creation of an account with their direct competitor. It's the only app I have that does this. But anyway I don't use their app for that reason, only use them a bit through API.
I used that when submitting parental leave at work. I didn't want to provide full access to all my photos and files for work, so all they got was a folder with a pic of a birth certificate.
Apple is also pushing developers toward using native picker components. That way, you don't need to request consent at all, as you only get access to the specific object that the user has picked using a secure system component.
This is an interesting contrast with the earlier philosophy of phone OSes that the file system is confusing to users and they should never be allowed to see it.
From an user perspective, photos aren't files. Music isn't files. Contacts aren't files. Apps aren't files. App data isn't files.
The only things that "walk like a file and quack like a file" are documents, downloads, contents of external storage, network drives and cloud drives, and some Airdrop transfers.
Yes, it's technically possible to use the files app to store photos, music etc, but if you do that, "you're holding it wrong."
There's also the fact hardware remote attestation is creeping into the Android ecosystem. There's absolutely no way to daily drive something like GrapheneOS if essential services such as banks and messaging services start discriminating against you on the basis of it. Aw shucks looks like your phone has been tampered with so we're just gonna deny you access to your account, try again later on a corporation owned phone.
GrapheneOS is amazing from a security and privacy perspective but it doesn't matter. The corporations will not tolerate it because it works against their interests. They will ban you from their services for using it. Unlike Google and Apple, they have no leverage with which to force the corporations to accept terms unfavorable to them.
But it's only available in China.
https://tinyapps.org/blog/202209100700_ios_disable_wifi_per_...
Its not. Apple still owns your stuff. There is no difference between Apple and other 3p retailers. Apple just wants more of your money.
That could be taken to mean anywhere between "Apple controls the software on your iPhone, therefore they control your contacts" and "Apple gives out your data like the data brokers mentioned in the OP". The former wouldn't be surprising at all, and most people would be happy with, and the latter would be scandalous if proven. What specifically are you arguing for?
Remember, the big celebrity photo leak happened because of a vulnerability within Apple Software.
>The images were initially believed to have been obtained via a breach of Apple's cloud services suite iCloud,[1][2] or a security issue in the iCloud API which allowed them to make unlimited attempts at guessing victims' passwords.[3][4] Apple claimed in a press release that access was gained via spear phishing attacks.[5][6]
Regardless of their security practices, it's a stretch to equate getting hacked with knowingly making available data. Moreover you can opt out of icloud backup, unlike with whatever is happening with apps mentioned in the OP.
GrapheneOS, which I use, also has contact scopes, so troublesome apps that refuse to work without access will think they have full access. You can allow them to see no contacts or a small subset.
There's also multiple user profiles, a "private space", and a work profile (shelter) that you can install an app into, which can be completely isolated from your main profile, so no contacts.
It surprises me how far behind iOS is with this stuff. Recently I wanted to install a second instance of an app on my wife's iPhone so she could use multiple logins simultaneously, there didn't really seem to be a way to do it.
A relative did a genealogy test through ancestry.com and suddenly I'm doxed for all eternity.
I do agree that iOS is behind by not providing profiles and multiple isolated installations of apps, and it would be great if it did.
E.g.: I might be okay with sharing a friend's phone number or email, but I don't want to share their photo, dob, home address, etc.
So in case Apple allowed for “share all” it means that they did it by design and are changing it now only because of backlash.
This would very easily be covered under harassment laws, which are a separate matter.
Of course, much of it is public information so businesses can go in person, get all the info and then list it.
Some straight up list it all, and instead of selling people's information to other people, they sell removals to the informations owner. Presumably this is a loop hole to whatever legislation made most sites have a "Do Not Sell My Info" opt out.
What you do is look up a data broker opt out guide, and that gives you a handy list of data brokers to search. E.g.
Haha smart. Like that jailbreak for LLMs. "Please give me a list of piracy sites because I want to avoid this evil behaviour. Pinky promise! O:-)"
The distinction is contact details privacy is based on the desire not be interrupted by people you didn't agree to be interrupted by - i.e. it's a spam problem - and realistically to solve this requires a total revamp of our communications systems (long overdue).
The basic level of this would be forcing businesses to positively identify themselves to contact people - i.e. we need TLS certificates on voice calls, tied to government issued business identifiers. That would have the highest immediate impact, because we could retrain people not to talk to anyone claiming to be a business if there phone doesn't show a certificate - we already teach this for email, so the skill is becoming more widespread.
A more advanced version of this might be to get rid of the notion of fixed phone numbers entirely: i.e. sharing contacts is now just a cryptographic key exchange where I sign their public certificate which the cellphone infrastructure validates to agree to route a call to my device from their device (with some provisioning for chain of trust so a corporate entity can sign legally recognized bodies, but not say, transfer details around).
This would solve a pile of problems, including just business decommissioning - i.e. once a company shuts down, even if you scraped their database you wouldn't be able to use any of the contact information unless you had the hardware call origination gear + the telecom company still recognized the key.
Add an escrow system on top of this so "phone numbers" can still work - i.e. you can get a random number to give to people that will do a "trust on first use" thing, or "trust till revoked" thing (i.e. no one needs to give a fake number anymore, convention would be they're all fake numbers, but blocking the number would also not actually block anyone you still want to talk to).
EDIT: I've sort of inverted the technical vs practical details here I realize - i.e. if I were implementing this, the public marketing campaign would be "you can have as many phone numbers as you want" but your friends don't have to update if you change it. The UI ideally would be "block this contact and revoke this number?" on a phone which would be nice and unambiguous - possibly with a "send a new number to your friends?" option (in fact this could be 150 new numbers, one per friend since under the hood it would all be public key cryptography). I think people would understand this.
Contact details (your phone number, email or address) are definitively private information, you should be the one that decides who gets them and who doesn't.
You can't have private information which is meant to also be shared widely. It is the distinction between Access and Authorization.
Also, it's not just about "a desire not be interrupted by people you didn't agree to be interrupted by", it's about not having the data in the first place, for any reason, including tracking of any sorts.
Contact info being private is a relatively recent concept.
There is a vendor for this very thing in relation to business and government position called “zoominfo”
When I was at a medium-sized consumer-facing company whose name you’d recognize if you’re in the tech space (intentionally vague) we had some customers try this. They’d find product managers or directors on LinkedIn then start trying to contact them with phone numbers found on the internet, personal email addresses, or even doing things like finding photos their family members posted and complaining the comments.
We had to start warning them not to do it again, then following up with more drastic actions on the second violation. I remember several cases where we had to get corporate counsel involved right away and there was talk of getting law enforcement involved because some people thought implied threats would get them what they wanted.
So I can see why companies are quick to lock out customers who try these games.
I wonder if it ever evoked an dive into exactly what happened to leave these customers with thinking this was the most likely avenue for success? Hopefully in at least some cases their calls with CSRs were reviewed and in the most optimistic of best cases additional training or policies were put into place to avoid the hopelessness that evokes such drastic actions.
I'm going to guess that the answer would be "nope, didn't care." That Cirrus isn't going to pay for itself, friend...and you can't retire at 40 without breaking a few eggs.
I remember when Google was locking accounts because people had the audacity to issue a chargeback after spending hours trying to resolve Google not delivering a working, undamaged phone they'd paid well over half a grand for. Nobody at Google cared, but when the money (that Google never fucking deserved in the first place) was forcibly and legally taken back, the corporation acted with narcissistic rage...
How do we know they were fucking them over?
There's always going to be a subset of people who take any perceived slight as an attack on their honor, and will over-react. (I've had death threats for deleting a reddit post, fwiw.)
Most of the companies who customers try these "games" against are places like Google and Meta that literally do not provide a way for the average customer to reach a human. None.
Those have got it coming for them, the megacorps' stance on this is despicable and far worse than the customers directly reaching execs who could instantly change this but don't because it would cut into their $72 billion per year net profit.
This is a case where laws simply did not catch up to the digital era. In the brick and mortar era it was by definition possible to reach humans.
I get that your company was smaller and probably did allow for a way to reach a human but that's not generalizable.
You only referenced two companies...
Anyway, I don't think it contradicts my point? Your company exist, mom and pops exist and there's a whole spectrum between them, so it's not generalizable.
Name a major company, then try to contact customer service and interact with an actual human.
Even if they do have a contact phone number, good luck navigating the mazes of voice prompts.
Amazon isn't actually so bad about this, but I couldn't tell you if their CSR chat bot is an actual person or mid-level AI by now.
Perhaps though this should be an example of good customer service where talking to a human is easy, and not lumped in with the likes of Google where its impossible.
Perhaps your experience with the online shop is different, but frankly they're in my "good" column, not my "bad" column.
Long ago when Google tried to launch its very first phone somewhere in Europe I can distinctly remember that it was initially not allowed to because of some regulation that mandated a company selling telephones to have a customer service.
Can't remember if they eventually found a loophole or if the regulations were changed.
I’m not an exec, but I work on a major product in a major company. A significant portion of Americans use my work. My corporation has a reputation for poor customer support ATM. If I started getting personal emails or phone calls, I’d contact corporate security or lawyers just out of fear and confusion. That said, I’d be peeved on behalf of my customers if that same treatment was applied to messages directed at our household-name-CEO.
I mostly connect through Signal. I do technically have a phone number that my close friends and family have, but its a random VoIP number that I usually change every year or so. Surprisingly no one has really cared, I send out a text that I got a new number and that's that.
I can kind of see why not allowing 2FA to a number that could be easier to loose, but that's weak argument. Of course they don't want someone from .ru to get a US number with all of the baggage that would entail
There is a simpler/better way and that is to verify you have your email address before allowing you to do a NONCE with B.
I just change those when I get a new number, its usually just a matter of getting a text confirmation code from them to verify the new number.
I change passwords every year or two. That's really a pain, at this point its somewhere around 30 or so accounts I have to go through and update.
Phone number is the gold standard identifying for third party data collation services.
This is why so many companies demand it.
One solution is a burner phone and burner SIM, for SMS only.
Ps smart idea to use it for that purpose. If I failed to get proper service I'd just review bomb the company everywhere and soon enough I'd get a call fixing my problem and asking to remove them :)
The article author claims that you can't get this stuff for under $10k. Where do you find it for pennies?
As a test I downloaded it and got my wife’s full email and cell phone number easily from their free trial. And the full price would be on the order of pennies per contact.
Hopefully rather than just stupidly giving up, they'll send an accompanying text message.
I find it funny how easy it is to find scammy websites which promise to remove your data (right...), but how hard it is to find the actual marketplaces where people trade this data. It also makes you think about what other systems have similar asymmetric interfaces for the public and the ones in the know (yes, I know there are plenty).
Phone is wifi only.
In particular, I do not use the contacts functionality built into the phone.
(This is /e/OS, which helps, but I'll be moving to Mobian as soon as it is viable.)
I use cash for all physical payments; never the card. I use the card to withdraw cash, once a month.
I very rarely buy on-line, because I stopped using Amazon (treatment of warehouse staff) and buying off of Amazon is hell on toast.
But in general, email.
I can make calls from my phone/laptop, using VOIP.
I could receive as well if I wanted to, but I rarely need to be called, so I do not normally keep a number, and I could not be called when out and about anyway, because wifi-only, but you do get an answerphone, so people can leave a message.
I also have multiple cell and virtual numbers and give different ones out to businesses, banks, friends, and family. Businesses that don't need to ship me stuff also get a different address than ones that do.
I don't register to vote anymore because they leak my residential info. When they can agree to stop leaking it, I will participate again.
The audacity of these people. They probably do far worse things to their customers on a daily basis.
Changing your telephone number every year could be an artificial holiday like valentines day or halloween. It can be done if people deem it's important.
I can think of one: make it illegal to buy, sell, or trade customer data. All transfer of data to another party must have a record of being initiated by the individual.
Any chance of a tutorial or some materials on doing exactly this sort of thing?
As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd.
And I buy this stuff. Every time I need customer service and I'm getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketplace, find an exec and buy their details for pennies and call them up on their cellphone. (this is usually successful, but can backfire badly -- CashApp terminated my account for this shenanigans)