Recent Articles

Zack Whittaker:

Apple is telling app developers to remove or properly disclose their use of analytics code that allows them to record how a user interacts with their iPhone apps — or face removal from the app store, TechCrunch can confirm.

Michael Grothaus:

Using Glassbox’s session reply technology, app makers can see every tap and swipe you make. Keystrokes are also recorded and any text you write is captured as well, though text inputs are usually masked so as to hide sensitive information like credit card or passport numbers. However, TechCrunch found that not all apps that are using Glassbox’s tech are masking data fields properly, leaving sensitive information exposed in the screen recordings. And since all screen recordings go back to the app developer through Glassbox’s servers, anyone at the company with access to those servers could potentially see a user’s unmasked personal data.

Ban them, and it’s not just Glassbox. In fact, apps should have to disclose the analytics packages they use in the app description.

Matthew Hughes:

That figure sounds like a lot, but it’s absolutely astronomical when spread across an entire year. It equates to more than 100 days of online time every year for every Internet user. That’s more than 27 percent of every year.

Nicole Karlis, reporting on the new study:

As the researchers state: “We find little evidence to support the hypothesis suggested by prior work that Facebook might be more beneficial for ‘active’ users—for example, users who regularly comment on pictures and posts from friends and family instead of just scrolling through their news feeds.”

The whole report is basically: you’re better off without it.

Josh Constine:

We asked Guardian Mobile Firewall’s security expert Will Strafach to dig into the Facebook Research app, and he told us that “If Facebook makes full use of the level of access they are given by asking users to install the Certificate, they will have the ability to continuously collect the following types of data: private messages in social media apps, chats from in instant messaging apps – including photos/videos sent to others, emails, web searches, web browsing activity, and even ongoing location information by tapping into the feeds of any location tracking apps you may have installed.” It’s unclear exactly what data Facebook is concerned with, but it gets nearly limitless access to a user’s device once they install the app.

Why do people keep going to work at this company? Kudos to Apple though for swiftly shutting this down.

(BTW, Google is doing it too.)

Love it. Want it. So very Westworld. Goodness I hope someone makes this a reality. One device for everything. That’s the dream, shit, we had that in the 90s. Well, not that you could take those everywhere, mostly just that you could only afford to have one.

On one hand, this is a clever way for them to go about finding these vulnerabilities. On the other: no thanks.

Good synopsis.

Only surprising part is that it took this long, I guess.

Love these suggestions.

Roger McNamee:

The people at Facebook live in their own bubble. Zuck has always believed that connecting everyone on earth was a mission so important that it justified any action necessary to accomplish it. Convinced of the nobility of their mission, Zuck and his employees seem to listen to criticism without changing their behavior. They respond to nearly every problem with the same approach that created the problem in the first place: more AI, more code, more short-term fixes. They do not do this because they are bad people. They do this because success has warped their perception of reality.

Only people who will be shocked by this are the ones who wasted money on these.