[HN Gopher] Grindr user data has been for sale for years
___________________________________________________________________
Grindr user data has been for sale for years
Author : pondsider
Score : 183 points
Date : 2022-05-02 13:51 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| racl101 wrote:
| Oof. Niche dating app selling your data. Not good.
| lostgame wrote:
| I posted this in another comment - but - here's the worse
| thing.
|
| It's not just niche, like a Christian dating app.
|
| If I am a Christian - frankly - living in North America - I've
| got nothing to hide to anyone, mostly.
|
| I probably came from a Christian family, and - if I didn't -
| being Christian isn't something that frankly carries the stigma
| that being gay/trans/lesbian/bi/etc, does.
|
| I would know, because I happen to be Christian, transgender,
| and lesbian. :P
|
| There's an argument that with privacy 'if you have nothing to
| hide, why do you care?' - and being on the LGTBQ+ spectrum
| _nukes_ that argument, just as being a stoner in a weed-hating
| state might.
|
| Selling the orientation of individuals for profit is an
| _abomination_ of capitalism, such a risk to the queer
| community, and such a fundamental and brutal rape or privacy,
| that I frankly hope to see a class action lawsuit over this.
|
| Grindr shutting down completely would not be good enough; here.
| This is beyond felonious. This is a human rights violation of
| the utmost degree.
| headphonepoopr wrote:
| I am appalled by this and I hope they have to pay for it as
| much as others in this thread but, I'm sorry, categorizing
| hypothetically selling your data which could hypothetically
| be used for harm as a "human rights violation of the utmost
| degree" really dilutes the severity of real human violations
| that have actually happened (see I don't know, child rape,
| forced sterilization etc). That's an interesting choice of
| framing.
|
| Why openly disclose your sexual preference/orientation so
| eagerly on hacker news comments, then?
| moate wrote:
| If I say stealing a car is "criminal to the utmost degree"
| would you say "I'm sorry, but categorizing theft of
| property as criminal really dilutes the severity of real
| criminal violations that have actually happened"?
|
| I ask this because "human rights" is a wide and varied
| collection of thoughts and ideas ranging from the right to
| not be sexually assaulted to the right to not have
| businesses you interact with sell data about your sexual
| behaviors.
|
| My point is, the whole conversation is subjective. You're
| both wrong in the eyes of some people and completely
| reasonable and correct in the eyes of others. Just some
| helpful framing you might want to use before "whatabouting"
| when people's lives may literally be on the line for this
| information being disseminated in their home countries.
|
| From the safety of my home in an exceedingly liberal state
| in the US, working for an employer with a decent track
| record for inclusivity, I would be Big Mad if my grindr
| data was sold. From Chechnya, I would be terrified for my
| safety, physically as well as at a job, in the same
| situation.
|
| TL;dr- When people stop being hate-crimed or state-
| santioned-murdered for being gay, the community will stop
| "overreacting" to people outing us against our wishes.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > If I say stealing a car is "criminal to the utmost
| degree" would you say "I'm sorry, but categorizing theft
| of property as criminal really dilutes the severity of
| real criminal violations that have actually happened"?
|
| And I'm pretty sure that if we follow the argument to
| absurdity, all of us should only be talking about a
| single incident at a time. The _worst_ one, that renders
| the rest not only irrelevant but disrespectful and
| insulting to the _real victim._
| colatkinson wrote:
| What do you think would happen to an LGBT person in, say,
| Saudi Arabia? The answer is, "capital punishment, fines,
| public whipping, beatings, vigilante attacks, vigilante
| executions, torture, chemical castrations, imprisonment up
| to life and deportation." Those seem like they're well into
| the category of "real human violations."
|
| This is also not a hypothetical situation -- something
| quite similar happened in Egypt a few years ago [1]. And
| that was using good old fashioned entrapment. The damage
| could have been far more significant with large-scale data
| analysis.
|
| While I can't speak for OP: they likely feel comfortable
| posting about their gender/sexuality on here because they
| live in a place where that won't happen. And while HN is
| often less than progressive on LGBT issues, users here
| generally aren't calling for public executions. But not
| everyone lives in the US or Western Europe, and these
| people live under a genuine threat of death.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia
|
| [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-
| east/egypt-l...
| throwanem wrote:
| If I _decide_ to tell you, or everyone who reads HN
| comments, that I 'm gay, then that's up to me. I can choose
| whether and how to disclose, or not to disclose, depending
| on my evaluation of risk, which will be fairly accurate
| because I have a lifetime of experience in making such risk
| assessments and seeing how they play out. (In this case I'm
| not too worried, because I've been out for a long time, so
| if it gets broadly fashionable again to discriminate
| against us queers then I already have the same problems in
| either case.)
|
| If I use a dating app that promises it will maintain its
| data about my orientation as confidential, and that app
| turns out to have been lying all along, then I'm forced to
| run the risk no matter whether I would have _chosen_ to do
| so. Because I can 't know who is accessing that data or
| what they're doing with it, I don't even have a way to know
| how much risk I've been forced to take on. And because I
| have no way to remove my information from the dataset, I
| don't have any control over how long that risk continues to
| be present; I have to assume it's forever, or at least as
| long as a copy still exists.
|
| It's a good example in microcosm of all the issues around
| handling sensitive data that this industry has had ever
| since anyone began trusting us with such data in the first
| place.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I agree with all that you and lostgame have posted, but I
| think it's irrelevant in modern times. There are so many
| ways to track us (that are probably being stored
| indefinitely) that your sexual orientation, private
| religious or political beliefs, or anything else that can
| be gleaned from your movements and associations will be
| available for any future administration that decides a
| certain class of people should be rounded up.
|
| The Holocaust, through computerized processing of census
| data (via IBM), found "Jews" who didn't even know that
| their maternal grandmothers were Jewish. Comparing those
| primitive records and tech to today is like comparing
| Hiroshima to the nukes of today. If some US
| administration 20 years from now decided that they wanted
| to round up all of the communists, homosexuals, and Jews
| with a 90% certainty, even assuming technology hasn't
| advanced an inch in the interim, they could get the list
| within days. I think it would be easy even if we turned
| off the data spigots _today_ and 20 years from now they
| only had access to data collected between the dawn of web
| 2.0 and now.
| throwanem wrote:
| I've never been all that favorably inclined to the
| counsel of despair.
|
| That goes double when we're discussing an issue that goes
| to the heart of how we as an industry conduct ourselves -
| to what standard we hold ourselves and one another.
|
| Granted, right now no such standard exists. I don't think
| that will always be true; if we don't regulate our own
| behavior then someone will certainly do so for us. I
| think it'd be a good idea if we had a say in how it
| happens, and when we have people apparently arguing that
| no one should expect anyone to hold us to any standard,
| it's very hard for me even to imagine an argument in
| support of the idea that we _deserve_ one.
|
| I'd also like to think that, by being in this industry,
| we're not all in the position of an RJR or Philip Morris
| employee trying to believe we aren't _really_ peddling
| addiction and cancer. Whether that sort of thing bothers
| anyone else, it 's not up to me to decide, though I think
| it should. It _does_ bother me.
| vinni2 wrote:
| It's unfortunate that majority of the gay community uses this app
| despite knowing privacy risks.
|
| But there are some precautions one could take to reduce the
| risks. Like turning off precise location for specific apps is
| possible in iOS. I assume similar feature is available in android
| too. This might not help much in a big densely populated city but
| in a small city this is good enough to find people on Grindr. I
| also turn off the location access for Grindr once I favorite some
| people I like to keep in touch with.
| lostgame wrote:
| As a lesbian - this is terrifying.
|
| Not for myself - because I'm out - but because the fact that I am
| out would potentially be for sale, and - for instance - my
| primary partner - isn't.
|
| She comes from such a traditional family, and her home country is
| so anti-queer - that if they somehow found out her parents would
| literally likely commit suicide - the exact same thing happened
| to a friend of hers, and it's unfortunately a very real concern.
|
| This marks the official crossing of the line from any potential
| 'if you don't have anything to hide, why do you care' bullshit
| excuse that fucking idiots use to push privacy issues aside.
|
| If you are not out - it is not okay for _ANYONE_ you don't know
| to know you're gay /lesbian/bi/whatever.
|
| This is a brutal fucking outrage. I'm frankly _fuming_ , like -
| on the verge of an anxiety attack - over this.
|
| Lawsuits had _better_ fucking ensue.
|
| Frankly, this makes me want to preemptively leave HER (the
| lesbian equivalent of Grindr) - before I find out the same shit
| is happening.
|
| Die, Grindr. Fucking die.
|
| As a queer person this may be the single greatest abomination
| I've seen a corporation claiming to support the LGTBQ+ community
| commit.
| vmception wrote:
| > She comes from such a traditional family, that if they
| somehow found out they'd literally likely commit suicide.
|
| "they" in this case is the family finding out and the family
| committing suicide? or did "they" change mid-sentence. Sounds
| bad for any party finding out, just trying to understand the
| threat model here. If your primary partner found out about the
| widely reported data leak existing and becoming suicide sounds
| now extremely probable. The other possible readings of that
| sentence are, extreme, but less extreme in probability.
|
| Just a couple readings of this that aren't clear.
| pinot wrote:
| It's perfectly clear given the context.. no one's family
| member commits suicide over finding out their relative is
| gay.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| You are fortunate to have grown up in a culture where that
| is mostly true. However, in some cultures, the "shame" of
| that disclosure about their child is considered worse than
| death. Horrifically sad, but true.
| prepend wrote:
| I think GP is saying there are countries with stigma
| against homosexuality that family members would kill
| themselves to find out that their children were gay. That's
| what I understood.
| lostgame wrote:
| Absolutely, 100%.
| vmception wrote:
| Narrator: it wasn't clear. The family member was who was
| being referred to.
| lostgame wrote:
| Her parents, sorry. Edited. A very similar thing happened to
| her friend, so it's a reasonable concern. Her home country is
| fucked in that regard.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _...the single greatest abomination I've seen a corporation
| claiming to support the LGTBQ+ community commit._
|
| Just wait a few months, something else will probably show up.
| Remember that "claiming to support the LGBTQ+ community" is, in
| almost every case, just a calculated way to increase their
| profits. Change a few logos, let the PR department fund a
| float, and wait for the additional dollars to roll in!
|
| > _Frankly, this makes me want to preemptively leave HER (the
| lesbian equivalent of Grindr) - before I find out the same shit
| is happening._
|
| Good. Do it. The entire core of our modern consumer tech
| ecosystem is based around this sort of deception and lying. If
| it's a popular app, it's making the money on the backend
| somewhere. Robinhood (the stock trading app) was _literally_
| just selling off order flows to the high frequency traders who
| would pay them rather obscenely large sums of money for the
| "Heyo, I've got someone ready to buy 15 shares of GME, I'm
| going to buy 15 shares of GME now, and... buy!" data. They
| _existed_ to sell out an audience who didn 't know better for
| fractions of a cent per trade, but in volume.
|
| If you don't mind some dense reading, Zuboff's book on
| Surveillance Capitalism is well worth the read. The author is
| just in love with high scoring Scrabble words for no good
| reason, unless she finds a reason to invent a new word instead.
| But the outcome of it is that you'll want to regularly frisbee
| your smartphone across the room into the nearest wall without a
| case.
|
| "Modern consumer tech" is absolutely, 150%, at odds with _any_
| concept of personal privacy. And the more people start opting
| out, the sooner we can go back to "My personal habits are not
| your profits."
| Jensson wrote:
| Any large company that doesn't explicitly say "we aren't selling
| your data" is definitely selling your data. You can't really
| trust what they say, but you can trust what they don't say.
| pedro2 wrote:
| It's worse. Google and friends don't sell your data either.
|
| They just assign you to various buckets and then aggregate the
| information in those buckets to sell targeted advertising.
|
| But they don't sell your data :)
|
| At this time, it's best to assume apps with trackers embedded
| (you can check that with Aurora Store) sells data associated
| with you indirectly.
| EduardoBautista wrote:
| How is this worse? I'd much rather companies do this instead
| of selling the actual data. In fact, I don't think this is
| much of a privacy issue at all.
| pedro2 wrote:
| My point is, unless you are a lawyer, you can't trust
| anything they write about how they use your data -- they
| don't speak the same language as us.
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| The irony is what you wrote is categorically false.
| Selling user personal data to a third party, which users
| have no idea how that data will be used, is not better
| than companies showing users targeted ads. Not everything
| on earth has to be a hot take.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Selling user personal data to a third party, which
| users have no idea how that data will be used, is not
| better than companies showing users targeted ads.
|
| This isn't what was said. What was being said is that the
| people who claim that they don't sell your data have such
| complex ways of still selling your data while being
| literally truthful that there's no way to confidently
| evaluate risks no matter what they say.
|
| edit: I mean, do you know for certain that a determined
| attacker can't bulk unmask Google or Facebook users
| through skillful monitoring of ad auctions and specific
| ad placements?
| aaomidi wrote:
| It definitely is still a privacy issue. You only need a few
| data points to fully identify a person.
|
| But no it's not as bad as just selling the raw data.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Just read anything from a privacy policy in a Nixon-intonation
| "I am not a crook!" style and you'll get what you need from it.
| A touch of Futurama-Nixon jowl-flapping adds much to the
| imagined statements.
|
| They're all written in the, "Well, _technically,_ our lawyers
| claim we 're not _lying_... " style. But they're sure not end-
| user friendly, which is the exact point.
|
| And any time they claim they're not doing something explicitly,
| look for ways they might have navigated around it carefully.
| Roku's "you agree to let us do anything we want" policy, for
| instance, includes a dutiful agreement to not do anything
| prohibited by the laws of the country your data is stored in.
| Of course, they then later state that they can move your data
| to any country they want.
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| blakesterz wrote:
| "The activities that have been described would not be possible
| with Grindr's current privacy practices, which we've had in place
| for two years."
|
| At least according to them, it's more accurate to say "Had been
| for sale for years". They say they've put a stop to it.
| jmcgough wrote:
| I don't really trust them tbh they've never cared that much
| about user safety or privacy. You can still triangulate
| people's location, in Egypt this was used to imprison LGBT
| people.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Don't quote me, and I'm not defending grindr, but I _think_
| they geoban certain locations for this reason.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's a nitpick, but it's trilateration and you're right that
| it is still trivial to do.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| I'm sure there's navigators who discovered California-sized
| lands (from the perspective of Europeans not of those who
| already lived there), that called it "triangulizacion" in
| Spanish. They triangulized, or triangulated.
|
| And it was cool the first time, with mountain peaks, and a
| very accurate compass, going on a hike and figuring out
| where you were on a map, without the whole satellite
| cakewalk.
|
| But all of that's a nitpick of a nitpick, you and the
| parent post are totally right. But like totally. You should
| all have read the last paragraph in this post first, what I
| said doesn't change things, it's trivial to get our
| positions.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Haha, yeah, that's what I get for doing a "well,
| akshully" on my phone.
| rkallos wrote:
| Grindr's response to this article:
| https://blog.grindr.com/blog/the-wsjs-old-news
|
| > What the WSJ describes would not be possible with our privacy
| practices today, practices we proactively implemented two years
| ago
|
| > Grindr takes the privacy of its users extremely seriously, and
| we have put privacy before profit
|
| > Grindr does not share users' precise location, we do not share
| user profile information, and we do not share even industry
| standard data like age or gender
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > or gender
|
| Gee, I wonder if the advertiser can take a guess.
| verisimi wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that lots and lots of companies are collecting
| and selling data.
|
| What I really wonder is whether disclosure of these sorts of
| leaks is selective. I suspect it is. The point being that in
| showing one or 2 cases, and then showing the system taking a
| retrospective action, gives the impression that we are being
| protected. I suspect that grindr has been selected as a
| sacrificial lamb (of little consequence - eg its not tinder) -
| and will possible be put through some legal process and appear to
| be made an example of.
|
| If so, the news will have some headlines, and it will appear that
| the governance process is doing its job.
|
| I don't think we are being protected though - it would be easy to
| pass legislation that made these sorts of actions illegal. What
| is being protected is the reputation of those businesses
| undertaking the collection. The cost is that we are kept in
| ignorance of how bad and systemic the situation really is.
| pessimizer wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
| pedro2 wrote:
| Aurora Store allows to list the trackers embedded in apps you
| install.
| a-dub wrote:
| there's another system i saw on here that uses the VPN api to
| monitor for saas adware connections in apps. i think it was
| developed in europe or was part of a research project.
|
| the future of firewalls will be keeping your data in is my
| bet...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Anyone have a link to this or have information that makes
| finding it easier?
| a-dub wrote:
| found it!
|
| https://trackercontrol.org/
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Thanks
| a-dub wrote:
| worth noting that this doesn't catch instances where the
| app developer collects the data itself and then sells it
| (as opposed to just linking in a collection library from
| the third party).
|
| i suspect that there will probably be some cool research
| projects that try to embed identifiable watermarks in
| behavioral data and then attempt to detect them in
| purchasable data or data products and/or realtime
| behavior of ad companies.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Wow. This is pretty bad. So much potential for abuse or
| discrimination using this data.
| junon wrote:
| Anyone have a non-paywalled link?
| [deleted]
| Vladimof wrote:
| https://archive.ph/9V4kY
| nerdjon wrote:
| I hate that all of these apps (Grindr and similar) appear to take
| security and privacy secondary... which is just insane given the
| market they are serving.
|
| Sex is still considered taboo in many parts of the world and some
| parts of the US.
|
| Now this, we have them using the Facebook API and them knowing
| every time I open the app (or did).
|
| I have made every choice I can to reduce the privacy invasion
| that these companies engage in, but there are simply no
| alternatives for this one. I would be very surprised to find out
| that Scruff is actually any better.
|
| The web based ones are likely far far worse.
|
| I hate that this has become normal so much.
| firephonestival wrote:
| If you are a startup, you cannot create a popular app in a
| crowded marketplace by being scrupulous about best practices.
|
| Match owns almost all of the dating-app market, and they have
| extremely deep pockets to buy/extinguish competition with.
|
| Because of the consolidated nature of the market, and the
| winner-takes-all nature of the industry, I really believe that
| it is impossible for a new entry to gain popularity _and_ focus
| on hard problems like security.
|
| This is fundamentally a problem with capital allocation and
| incentives. There's not much that a small team can do about it.
| rhizome wrote:
| > _If you are a startup, you cannot create a popular app in a
| crowded marketplace by being scrupulous about best
| practices._
|
| > _Match owns almost all of the dating-app market, and they
| have extremely deep pockets to buy /extinguish competition
| with._
|
| Match owns almost all of the dating app market because
| they've acquired who? Startups who created popular apps in a
| crowded marketplace that they don't already own.
|
| Now, if you want to argue that you cannot create a popular
| app in a crowded marketplace without accepting a buyout offer
| from the dominant player, now that's a topic I think is worth
| quite a bit of discussion.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >I really believe that it is impossible for a new entry to
| gain popularity and focus on hard problems like security.
|
| Well, they _can_. New entrants to the dating app market
| always start out this way. They gain loads of initial trust
| and word of mouth growth by putting users first. But they
| inevitably fall victim to the same market forces as their
| competition, and slowly become the same thing. It happened to
| Tinder, it happened to Bumble, and it will happen to Hinge.
| rchaud wrote:
| Or they get acquired by the Match company (Tinder, OKC,
| Match.com, others) and just start poisoning the UX straight
| away.
| nerdjon wrote:
| Maybe for security (however that being second for any app is
| a serious issue).
|
| But this is a conscious choice. A small team should not need
| to make the decision to do something like this.
|
| Also Grindr or Scruff isn't exactly small and have a fairly
| devoted base that doesn't end just because they get into a
| relationship.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| > have a fairly devoted base that doesn't end just because
| they get into a relationship.
|
| At least in the US, one might imagine this is more
| important to users than hiding their sexual preference.
| throwanem wrote:
| That's quite a claim when, until Grindr's practice of
| selling PII was disclosed, no one had any reason to
| imagine that by using the app they would be disclosing
| their sexual orientation and behavior. In light of that I
| have no idea what preference you imagine to have been
| meaningfully revealed here.
| madamelic wrote:
| Users kinda suck and hate to pull out their wallets if they
| don't have to.
|
| Dating apps also suck at giving compelling reasons to pay
| them unless the app is purposefully made worse so they can
| sell the functionality back.
| nerdjon wrote:
| How much of that is because they have been conditioned
| that things should be free though?
|
| We have 10+ years of Google, Facebook, and others handing
| out major tools and functionality for free because of the
| privacy invasion.
|
| I have to wonder how things would have looked had that
| not become the norm.
|
| As far as being purposefully made worse, yeah both apps
| do that. Grindr charges $100, Scruff charges $120 a year.
| Considering how popular both apps are I have to assume
| they are pulling in quite a bit of money.
| [deleted]
| throwanem wrote:
| You appear to be arguing that it's better to betray your
| customers' intimate confidences, than to find a market you
| can address _without_ doing that.
|
| I'm sure that can't be what you are _trying_ to say -
| although, if it is, I can certainly understand why you made a
| throwaway to say it.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| I think he's saying don't even try, because some other
| company won't bother and it'll crush you.
| throwanem wrote:
| Fine! Don't try, then. "Someone is going to do this
| shameful thing, therefore there is no reason why _I_
| should _not_ do this shameful thing " isn't quite the
| logic of a sociopath, but only because a sociopath sees
| no need in the first place to excuse his own immoral
| behavior.
| firephonestival wrote:
| I'm not saying it's better, but that it is unavoidable
| given current market conditions.
|
| We all want our data to be handled securely, and we should
| try to understand why that does not happen.
| throwanem wrote:
| There's a difference between understanding why people
| behave dishonestly, and making excuses for dishonest
| behavior. You're doing the second one under the color of
| the first.
|
| No one _has_ to make a dating app. I don 't see how "no
| one could do it without betraying their users either!" as
| you argue - and, again, even granting this is true, which
| you've done nothing thus far to show - excuses the actual
| betrayal that actually has occurred. If you'd like to
| make an argument that it does, I'd be interested to hear
| that.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's just an observation about the
| situation that any player in that market would find itself
| in, so therefore when you look at apps in that market
| they're shitty about privacy.
|
| It's a comment about dating apps, not about people who
| decided _not_ to go into dating apps i.e. found "a market
| you can address without doing that."
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Match owns almost all of the dating-app market, and they
| have extremely deep pockets to buy/extinguish competition
| with.
|
| Sounds like a business opportunity.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| There's a few other sites that are good for hookups, but I
| wouldn't trust any apps. Sniffies and A4A are the ones I know
| of
| nerdjon wrote:
| I don't imagine sniffies, a4a, MH, bbrts (for anyone reading,
| please don't look these up while at work... or at least not
| on a work computer... these are all Gay hookup sites) is any
| better. Particularly the first one when it comes to location
| data considering it just legit shows a map if people.
|
| I really don't trust any of them (App or Website), enough so
| I have seriously contemplated getting an iPod touch or
| something and tethering anytime I want to use them. But I
| have not quite gone that far yet.
|
| There are certain conveniences the apps get you.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Eventually EU is going to ban data warehousing for any purpose
| other than storing and giving it back to the user.
|
| And honestly, I think it's necessary.
| doliveira wrote:
| I really hope so. Maybe this will yield better privacy-
| preserving schemes for data analysis and recommendation
| engines. Necessity is the mother of invention (or whatever
| the equivalent idiom is in English).
|
| I think I'm hardly making an original argument, but a big
| problem is binding Compute and Data, so companies have an
| incentive to hoard as much data as possible and keep it
| hostage. Feels like deep down that's the whole valuation of
| Silicon Valley
| perfunctory wrote:
| Why do you think the EU will do it?
| baisq wrote:
| They don't have a tech industry so they have nothing to
| lose from it.
| dspillett wrote:
| They are the closest to doing it than anywhere else at
| least, and still edging in the direction of greater
| regulation not less or on a plateau.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Probably because they're the jurisdiction that's taking
| user privacy rights the most seriously so far, with enough
| market share to leverage their demands.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Because most of that kind of industry is US based, and they
| earn money from EU users, so on one hand, you seem to be
| working "for the people", on the other hand, you fuck the
| americans :)
| smm11 wrote:
| Grindr's UI is second-to-none, in my opinion.
|
| At least the last time I checked it out, which was the day before
| I interviewed there. Were I working there, and found this out, I
| would no longer be working there.
| pinewurst wrote:
| https://archive.ph/9V4kY
| toper-centage wrote:
| At this point we need to be able to set our reported location
| manually on our phones natively. I don't want any number of apps
| to be able to sneakily collect such data. Android sort of allows
| it through 3rd party apps, but Google has all incentives in not
| making this trivial.
| m3047 wrote:
| There's a funny thing about cellphone modulation: makes it hard
| to locate a device. Cell phones need GPS so they can give their
| location to the eNBs (towers) so that the best tower can be
| selected, the towers can't do it on their own.
| est31 wrote:
| Android 12 finally has a feature to select approximate location
| per-app. iOS has supported this for a bit longer, since version
| 14. The accuracy of the "approximate" location is also much
| bigger for Android 12 than it is for iOS, but it's a good
| start.
| Syonyk wrote:
| I would go further. At this point, the "sneaky snacky
| smartphone" approach to data collection (in which everything
| that _can_ be collected _is_ being collected, and probably used
| for things you can 't imagine it would be useful for) starts to
| press heavily on the "And I therefore shouldn't carry a
| smartphone" side of the scales.
|
| I've seen some fun papers of "Well, you _could_ do this awful
| thing... " (comparison of accelerometer data to deconflict
| which nearby phones are in the same vehicle vs separate ones to
| better refine social graphs), in addition to all the stuff we
| _know_ is being done (ultrasonic signals in various ads,
| tracking shoppers by their wifi /bt beacon MACs, etc). I assume
| the state of what's actually being done is far worse than
| what's in the papers, because someone, somewhere, though they
| could get a signal out of something.
|
| Trying to "de-evil" this sort of system is, first and foremost,
| fiddling around the edges of what's possible (I expect various
| people are reading and thinking, "Oh, you think spoofing GPS
| will matter, _cute!_ ), but it's also remaining in the
| ecosystem that has, repeatedly, demonstrated that they're going
| to get their paws on everything they think they can justify,
| and then expand that over time.
|
| There's no reason that a TV needs to be doing automatic content
| recognition on various inputs, but they're all doing it these
| days.
|
| I've given up and I no longer carry a smartphone. I'd encourage
| those who can get away with it to do the same thing. You can't
| go hoovering up all my data from a dumber KaiOS device because
| it doesn't run all the apps, and if a company makes their
| desktop/laptop interface so painful to use to drive people to
| the phone interface, well, they're probably doing things I
| don't want to support anymore.
|
| Trying to "reduce the harm" of smartphones, more and more,
| feels like trying to figure out how to mitigate the impact of a
| world class meth addiction by focusing on the symptoms - "Oh,
| you need to hydrate better!" "Here's some skin moisturizer and
| a toothbrush!" and so on - without ever stating that the
| problem is the meth and that you need to stop using that, not
| try to figure out how to avoid losing your teeth while doing
| it.
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder if our smartphone addiction is going to look to
| people in the future the same way we look at smoking now.
|
| He says whilst posting from his phone ...
| Syonyk wrote:
| I sure hope so. And I hope that future is an awful lot
| closer. The past decade or so of teenagers can speak to
| just how nasty smartphone addictions can be, in terms of
| mental health, suicides, etc. I grew up with the internet,
| but we didn't have profit-driven advertising empires
| pretending to "connect people together" back then, either.
|
| Part of my reason for not carrying a smartphone anymore is
| to be a better example to my kids, and I certainly point
| out couples staring at his-n-hers smartphones at a
| restaurant instead of actually enjoying each other's
| company.
|
| Odds are good that instead of a smartphone, my daughter
| will just end up with her HAM license and a VHF handset
| instead. It'll cover the common cases direct simplex if I
| put a base station on the house, and my wife isn't opposed
| to getting her license either. :)
| bombcar wrote:
| HAM is nice also because it helps you remember that
| someone could be listening at any time, a lesson we often
| forget.
| kbos87 wrote:
| This is really tough because the only purpose of Grindr is to
| give it your location to see who is around you. There also
| needs to be much stronger requirements for end user
| transparency about where their data is going.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It would still serve its purpose even if you spoofed your
| location to be somewhere nearby or elsewhere. Nobody needs to
| be able to figure out exactly where specific users
| are/live/work via the platform.
| nerdjon wrote:
| Removing that ability removes one of the key functionality
| of these apps and why they are popular.
|
| Seeing that someone is 100 ft away is a common start of a
| conversation. Maybe they live in the same apartment, at a
| local coffee shop, work in the same building. Which leads
| to... well...
|
| That doesn't excuse the privacy issues though.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Plenty of people already spoof their locations on the app
| and the app itself offers location changing
| functionality, I'd hardly say that is removing
| functionality or defeating the purpose of the app.
| bobro wrote:
| dont they? isnt the point that you share your true location
| and in return see others' true locations?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Tindr straightforwardly sells the option to "Swipe" from
| other locations.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > we need to be able to set our reported location manually on
| our phones
|
| down-low, we have an emergency
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It's a shame that LineageOS doesn't let you spoof apps with
| bogus data anymore. It's much easier to let them think they're
| getting permissions than try to play whack-a-mole with opt out
| settings that could get reset at any time by bad actors.
| a-dub wrote:
| my understanding was that the first instance of that was way
| back in cyanogenmod back in the late 00s and that it was
| quashed when google basically said "we'll let you bootleg the
| play store, but only if you don't screw up revenue streams by
| feeding app developers garbage data"
| Melatonic wrote:
| If you enable "mock locations" in the Android developer
| settings I believe you can do just that. It has been awhile
| though
| InitialLastName wrote:
| A long time ago, when I lived within dating distance of the
| default coordinate (maybe City Hall?) of a global-destination
| city, a dating site I used introduced a feature that let users
| set their locations manually. Within hours of rollout, the site
| was completely unusable due to being full of people from around
| the world saying "I wonder what the dating scene in $city is
| like?".
| [deleted]
| rchaud wrote:
| That is still the case on some big apps like OKCupid. There
| are green-card hunters from poor countries that fill up the
| swipe queue and all have the same giveaway line:
|
| "I'm not based in [your city], I just change the location to
| talk to new people". It's frequent enough that I stopped
| using the app altogether. OKC was already going downhill well
| before this.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| OKC died when match bought it and they took down their blog
| post about why you should never pay for a dating app.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Even if you use 3rd party apps, Google location services will
| side step your mocked location. Apps can detect mocked
| locations, as well.
|
| Pretty sure SafetyNet, or something like it, from Google will
| also tattle on you if you spoof your location in apps that
| don't want you using mock locations, preventing you from using
| mock locations at all with apps.
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