- cross-posted to:
- mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
In the few short hours since I started using #Threads, #DuckDuckGo has already blocked over 200 data tracking attempts. These include things like “headphone status” and “screen density.”
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I started using #Threads
Ah, I see, there’s the problem.
Shit, did your phone extend a needle for a blood test?
There’s a reason it’s not allowed in the EU.
That seems so unnecessary. Why do they want to interfere with screen density??
Screen density is usually needed to work out the resolution of images to load. A high-DPI (“Retina”) screen uses higher-resolution images than a low-DPI screen.
opposite really… Notice “Screen Resolution” is on that list as a separate item as well…
Screen Density would tell you roughly how big the screen actually is. If you have a 4k panel… but it’s only 6 inches, you can probably serve up a 720p image instead of the full 4k one and the user won’t notice the difference since you’d have to hold the screen an inch away to see anything different.
Doesn’t screen density usually mean the pixel ratio? Or is it something different on Android?
Holy crap are you kidding? Mastodon IIRC requires zero priviliges/personal information to run.
Also, what the hell does it need “headphone status” for?
Honestly not defending them because the android app can potentially track your credit score, but this is probably to pause videos when headphones unplug and perform similar actions.
But it seems like DuckDuckGo is blocking them, which implies the system that’s tracking that is trying to upload that data onto a server, not just using it for pausing videos and stuff.
No - DuckDuckGo blocks the app from getting the data. It doesn’t know if that particular data is being sent over the internet or not. Seeing headphone status in its list just means the app tried to check the headphone status, not that it tried to send it anywhere.
wtf do they even need charging status, headphone status, volume, direction rotation accelerometer wtf
I’d guess that rotation is probably to rotate the video player when you rotate your phone.
Accelerometer is likely for the feature where you can shake the phone to report a bug.
Headphone status may be to pause videos when you unplug your headphones? Unsure.
if i understand correctly this isn’t just grabbing info for functionality but rather is info being permanently collected and stored, so this shouldnt be it otherwsie there would be no need to keep it
How would DuckDuckGo know the difference between grabbing the info temporarily vs permanently? The app would still be calling the same APIs.
Okay I’ll bite. I work in product management for capitalist software companies. Every single software product you use has trackers built in unless if you’re hardcore FOSS.
Even if the company has no interest in selling your data, it’s still really hard to learn about user behaviours in the real world in order to figure out what to build next. Many of these trackers are UX tools, much more than selling your data tools. My previous employer fully anonymized and aggregated usage data, but we can’t necessarily say the same for other companies.
These trackers are the industry default and honestly, I don’t know where we’d be without them. We use them to measure the success of what we build and to look for surprises/opportunities.
On that note, for products and websites that I like, I sometimes intentionally turn off my ad and privacy blockers for them (as long as it’s not intrusive). It’s hard to do our work without that data.
Obviously there’s a difference between UX analytics and data collection the data vacuuming Facebook does.
Say you can justify each piece of data collected via a UX element. Someone said in the comments: low battery, charger ad. Where do you draw the line between data for the product vs data for profit? You don’t. It’s all embedded in the idea of “the product”.
This is a company that sells ads AND data. They collect everything. Consumers don’t seem to care. Tiktok is still popular. People see this post and will still download Threads.
It’s important for people to understand the industry justification behind data collection and why it’s so widespread across the industry so we can have this conversation about what “too much data” actually means. Serving me relevant ads like places near me for food? I guess that’s a feature. A face aging app that we train to feed a military database of faces to track down deserters? Not so much.
that sells ads AND data
Companies like Google and Facebook don’t sell data. That’s a common misconception. Having data that other companies don’t have is what makes the companies valuable, so it doesn’t make business sense to sell it. What they do is allow advertisers to target people using that data. Advertisers never actually see the data, nor the exact users their ad reached, just aggregate metrics.
Don’t they have partnership agreements and secondary products that repackages their data as insights? (I’m thinking Cambridge Analytica.) It’s not a direct sale, per se.
Repackaged data in the form of other products is one way to do it.
No. Cambridge Analytica scraped data via the Graph API, which was open for apps to use.
The original idea with the API was that apps could become more social - for example, Spotify had a Facebook integration that’d show which of your friends use Spotify, and their favourite playlists (if they chose to share them). To handle this, the API granted access to not only your data, but some of your friends data. Keep in mind, this was all public profile data that people chose to make visible to public or at least to their friends.
That was fine when people were legitimately using it, but there were bad apps that didn’t follow the rules. Cambridge Analytica scraped data via a quiz app. People would click a link and log in to a quiz app on Facebook. The log in page shows a list of the data types that’d be shared, but people still logged into it. They’d then scrape all accessible data for both the person that logged in, as well as the data their friends had shared.
The API is very locked down now. People that use the API have to have a privacy audit of some sort, and much less data is available. A lot of people don’t like the API being so locked down (for example, it’s impossible to make third-party Facebook apps), but there really wasn’t any other choice.
Thanks for taking the time to educate me (and any passing readers.)
