As a mobile app developer I promise that you want to have push notifications that are capable of doing meaningful work on your phone. Apps are often entirely dead but a push notification from a central server will still get you X/Y/Z functionality.
Companies abuse this to then track you, and harvest endless amounts of information but the alternative is your phone no longer notified you of anything and the majority of background functionality for your apps dies entirely.
What I wish would happen is that mobile OSes have another set of location/network permissions for push notifications.
It’s pretty clear that it’s Apps, not iPhone. But also… iPhone is responsible for holding application developers to their terms of service. It’s absolutely appropriate to criticize them for failing to deliver what they’re selling in terms of claims to a more private ecosystem.
So why call out iphone? Because they’re supposed to manage every telemetric aspect of the 2.24 million apps on the app store?
Sure, ok. This connectivity is allowed, This connectivity isn’t. Sounds great, how do they find that information out? Super magical quantum computers probably.
Privacy isn’t a concrete object. Like you can buy a six pack of freedom and a bag of privacy. Pretending Apple’s responsible for all apps’ behavior is bullshit.
If they make an example of the big rule breakers, the rest will fall into line, making it easier to spot the little trouble makers…think of it like form mods. Sure they can’t catch everything, but by constantly allowing garbage through, that’s all they’ll get. If they enforce the rules then less will attempt to break them.
yup. if you’re running untrusted apps on your phone, make sure to turn off background refresh AND notifications. apps can run arbitrary code when they receive a push message. usually its so they can provide a better notification for the user, but they can collect data and phone back to the mothership too.
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