anonms-coward
Joined 6 years ago
Joined 6 years ago
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/07/a-new-low-in-...
SMS had the same problems forever, but isn't owned by a company, thus you can't blame xyz company if random apps access your SMS. No company got ever investigated by multiple nation states over that.
You still haven't addressed my main question though, how will a random app scraping your WhatsApp be any less of a scandal than Cambridge Analytica?
If we are to take the position that all users are tech literate and should be fully in charge of how their data is used, then even Cambridge analytica wasn't bad. People explicitly gave it access to data that was accessible to them. However, the uproar proves otherwise. People don't like it when they click yes yes and some random app has access to their social media data or messages. This is why Gmail also started requiring independent audit for all gmail apps.
1. Shady addictive game requires full access to drive.
2. Shady game downloads all your chats with all contacts
3. FB is on fire since they allowed access to people's chats with others, even those who didn't download the game.
4. People get mad on FB/Google for not protecting their data.
If you said something controversial 40 years ago at a grocery shop, shop owner might be mad and refuse to service you, and might even put a bad word for you across the town. In the worst and rarest case, you might have had to leave town.
Now, anyone can record the interaction, put it in front of more people on twitter than the front-page of a big newspaper. And this amplifies things. Not to mention that it remains there forever for the whole wide world.
At this point in many places, you will be more quickly forgiven for taking cash from a shop's register than saying something which is not the prevalent opinion.