this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Privacy
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The thing is there should be a big fucking warning screen when apps ask for contact permissions saying ‘You are sharing OVERLY sensitive and potentially DANGEROUS data’ and then have the screen wait until 15 sec before they can press OK
But they are reserved for when i am using an adblocker
If you have a normal social life it's honestly expected that a couple of people will leak your phone number (and contact name). Nothing you can really do about it. Happened to me many times.
I suppose I'm lucky I'm not a social person
Leaking it because someone they know personally asks? Sure. But the software side via social networks and other apps can absolutely be nailed down a lot more than it is.
am not wantings to be social anymore
That’s just a fundamental problem with security. You can vault up your home but give your idiot brother in law a key and find the back door wide open, him drunk on the kitchen floor.
Prompts don’t work and aren’t really the right way to go because they are annoying and pretty cryptic as apps often assign a myriad of features to a single permission. Everyone’s just going to hit OK.
It’s a difficult issue to solve because there are so many edge cases. And fundamentally you can’t really control what others do with your number.
Honestly. I wish we started talking about doing away with phone numbers altogether. I feel tech is there. And it’s honestly such a massive fingerprint. I’ve had mine for 20 years ffs.
Yeah. There's literally nothing you can put on a prompt that will truly work. It's still a good idea to prompt cause it will reduce how many people approve the prompt, but there is a significant number of people who don't read prompts at all and just insta-confirm.
At best, I think you could design it so there's no way for an app to request certain permissions themselves. They'd have to be opted in from the system settings and apps could only tell you how to do it. But that's a usability nightmare that is quite frustrating for legitimate usages. There's already some super sensitive permissions that do this. I think the ability to install apps, ability to display over other apps, and password managers for android.
People still wouldn't care. The value of privacy, for one's self or others, has seriously cratered in the last few decades.