Before I agree to let your app track me everywhere, I want something 'special' in return (winks)… "This website is requesting permission to access your location. Yes/No?" Absolutely not. My personal details are sacred! I learnt this the hard way. An unfortunate experience with what seemed like a harmless little app – RshnMobstr, I think it was called – taught me not to give away too much. The app asked perfectly innocent …
Wanted to find out the tyre pressure for our car. It was only a few weeks old, didn't have the manual to hand and couldn't remember, so Mrs T Googled for sites with the info. We put in the, make, model and age of the thing, but the site wanted to know our reg number and location before offering up the info.
I told her to stay away from the site and in the meantime I'd guess the pressures. As it turned out I wasn't far wrong. I now have the numbers engraved into my memory.
I have one usr for bluetooth and that is to connect to my solar panel controller, bluetooth will not function without location on, the controller is the other side of my kitchen wall, well within range.
There is no other means of interfacing with it either.
I also discovered that after a restart on this phone android enables data sharing between apps. Although all permissions are pared down to basic functionality.
Google argue that apps could scan nearby Bluetooth MAC addresses and work out your location so the app must have the location permission in is manifest and you must turn on location on the phone to show you agree to this hypothetical piece of nonsense happening... and also by the strangest of coincidences you also offer up your location to every other app on your phone which wants it and Google themselves.
It's because some white hat hackers pointed out that it's possible to figure out your location by looking at the bluetooth devices that you can see around you. Not easy, and needs a huge database that you can lookup devices to find the locations associated with them.
The Googly one, while 'improving' user privacy, decided that this meant that you MUST agree to allow access to 'Locations' when you only want to allow access to Bluetooth (or BT LE). This means that you also have to agree to full GPS location as well!
To really 'improve' user privacy they should have separated Bluetooth location out from the general location option. That way you can enable Bluetooth for something without giving them full GPS access as well.
--------------> Because they're always watching!
> they should have separated Bluetooth location
Come on, they found a halfway credible excuse to force people to enable location and you want them to give it up?
Having location is very important to them, as it's the only part of the whole "targeted ads" scam that actually works as promised, allowing you to show location-based ads in the rare cases it makes sense (It only works for individual brick and mortar stores, not for products or brands).
Some of us they watch more closely of course. Left wing grouping associated enemy of the state? Sorry Scottish Independence campaigner. Judging by the cuddly non threatening better world types the spooks have files on it seems reasonable to expect they have one on me.
Playing who is the informer to Special Branch at meetings is always a way to pass the time if things get boring. Why yes, I do tend to turn my phone offski before meetings. Why do you ask?
It's only for devices which need a specific app to connect to them. Things like audio devices or keyboards which use the OS Bluetooth system will work fine. Something which an app controls, like a fitness tracker, object tracker, or custom equipment will require access to fine Bluetooth control, which is lumped in with precise location access so the app gets both.
Wow !
the 5G roll out kills babies before they are born
I'm amazed that people can be this deluded, especially as we've been using the very same frequencies for years. Maybe they should also say that Channel 5 is killing babies too ...
And I'm pretty sure they won't understand the irony when they post their new T-shirt purchase on social media either.
In another story on the front page there's a story about toxicity in the Perl community.
I'm rather of the opinion that the human brain is unable to cope with social media instead of toxicity or stupidity in this community or that community, because it seems there's problems with practically any community you could name.
A small proportion of people are hate filled buckets of pus who just want to spatter over everyone they meet.
So it's absolutely certain that every community over a certain size has a few of them, and it generally takes a while before the admins bring out the banhammer.
So yeah, of course the Perl community has a few.
For an example of what happens when there is no moderator, look at Twitface.
> I'm amazed that people can be this deluded
Don't. Delusion and sticking to a belief despite strong evidence to the contrary is a fundamental trait of humans. It has spawned religions both spiritual and political all over the history of humanity, and still does it on a daily basis.
We like to flatter ourselves that we are intelligent, thinking creatures, while we're mostly just zombies somebody has already eaten the brains of. Don't believe me? Open a newspaper and look at the world with a critical eye (not the usual "thoughtless gut reactions" one).
Followed the link and read down to the bit where they say 5G kills babies before they are born, rolled my eyes and closed the page.
This grasp of science and engineering is exactly why they "seem to think a cotton protest T-shirt is an adequate defence against the harm they assert is being done by lamp posts".
Idiots, the lot of them.
"Followed the link and read down to the bit where they say 5G kills babies before they are born, rolled my eyes and closed the page."
But it's true! Me mum walked by a 5G tower back in the 70s when she wuz pregnant with me and I died.
...I got better.
"
It's always puzzled me that this this lot seem to think a cotton protest T-shirt is an adequate defence against the harm they assert is being done by lamp posts
"
Looks like they are a political party and according to the Electoral Commission they are registered under the name Graham Steele in Gateshead.
Probably Graham Steele, brother of 5G nutter/grifter Mark Steele. (No, not the comedian, that's Mark Steel.)
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxeb45/my-dad-got-hoaxed-by-the-anti-5g-conspiracy-movement
Grifter's gotta grift.
Thank you so much for the Mark/Mark differentiation, I wasn't a huge fan of (the comedy) Mr Steel but at least I knew what he stood for. The other one - obviously bonkers on a stick.
I've previously had a spat elsewhere with a 5G in street lamp = death ray proponent. "Yes, the PSU seems to be over specified, but that is not because it is part of a global conspiracy to flood the world with death rays that cause COVID. It is because it is an industrial application meant to last years with minimum maintenance. Unlike the PSU in the shitty LED nightlight, with a 7 month lifespan, that you bought from PoundWorld."
> nutters seem to be getting more attention
Nutters make the fortunes of Facebook and Twitter, and in return those two allow them to congregate worldwide, unite their voices, and recruit new followers among the feeble-minded. It's a win-win situation, and the social media business plan is "Crazies of the world unite!", since those create way more traffic than your aunt's gardening tips for instance.
A couple of things:
> "In addition to Allow All Cookies and Disallow All Cookies buttons, I would like websites to include a third option: Install A Lifetime Cookie To Remember You Clicked Disallow All Cookies."
For the love of God, THIS! I don't mind choosing to reject cookies, it's that I have to do it EVERY TIME that annoys me.
> "...sending the arse end of my personal profile stored in Google's data dungeons into an uncontrolled twerk"
That's the second keyboard you owe me from this year alone. (The first was for career pyromaniacs making the best IT managers.)
Oh, and, just because it's Friday:
> "London, Belgrade, Paris, Chicago, er... Herne Bay..."
...everybody talk about Pop Music!
>> "In addition to Allow All Cookies and Disallow All Cookies buttons, I would like websites to include a third option: Install A Lifetime Cookie To Remember You Clicked Disallow All Cookies."
>For the love of God, THIS! I don't mind choosing to reject cookies, it's that I have to do it EVERY TIME that annoys me.
I find that they usually do. but you still have to click on 'set preferences' and 'accept my preferences' because anything else will 'allow all'
Bastards.
"For the love of God, THIS! I don't mind choosing to reject cookies, it's that I have to do it EVERY TIME that annoys me."
Forget the cookies, I'd like the "never ask again" option for all the various sites I visit to pay bills (mortgage, other "finance", utilities) who ask every. expletive. time. if I want e-billing to my email instead of paper in the mail.
Although, with the US Postal (dis-)Service at an all-time low, it might be time to reconsider my long-held preference.
"[...] if I want e-billing to my email instead of paper in the mail."
Barclays Bank regularly sends me an email saying that my statements will in future be available only online. Each time I have to go to my online account to set the status again for paper statements.
A bit like Eon - who virtually demand I make an appointment to have a smart meter fitted. They register the "NO!" - and then say they will ask again in a few months.
And there are a huge number of sites where, although you have clicked Deny All, have an extra twiddly bit hidden in a corner labelled Legitimate Interest.
That is where you find that their "Legitimate Interest" means selling you to as many scammers as possible in exactly the way you objected to earlier on.
One site I visited used those godawful mobile app sliding switches for its cookie notice, and the color scheme was bright baby blue as the disabled color, with a grey as the enabled—and they slid to the left when enabled. And of course, all the switches were by default enabled. The only way to tell the switches' true settings was to look at the barely-visible "on/off" text on the button that changed with state, in tiny font with a similar color to the switch knob.
Suffice to say I bailed so fast I don't remember what I visited it for.
Great, and once they've done that all the anti-5G conspiracy lot will roam the streets shooting out all the lights and turning everywhere into a mugger's paradise................. Mind you, I'd be kind of agreeing that turning the street lighting into a huge council run spy network is maybe going a little bit too far. Can't we just have them lighting the streets?
> turned off to reduce the carbon footprint
Carbon footprint being an accounting problem, it can and will be solved by some simple creative accounting, like buying "carbon points" from someone who didn't need them all. It has worked like that for years and is a perfectly streamlined system by now, allowing people to make big money and still pollute as much as they want.
As for street lamps, they aren't there to give light, but to reassure the registered voters that there aren't bad people hiding in the shadows. So there is no chance they will be turned off, at best they might be coupled to presence detectors so they might dim off on empty streets (and even that is questionable, since residents will hate the all-night light show on windy days, or when wildlife passes through to check the garbage cans).
"So there is no chance they will be turned off, [...]"
Our English council switches of all the street lighting from midnight until about 06:00. They leave the dual carriageway lights on - which accentuates the inky darkness on the parallel cycleway footpaths. Heaven help anyone arriving by a late train without a torch to guide them when walking home.
> Our English council switches of all the street lighting
Surprising. Most radical thing I've seen in Europe was switching off one streetlight in two, and that was in the boonies. How big/dense is that town of yours? Is there any night life to be expected, or is it a place everybody is supposed to go to bed early so he can be in the fields at sunrise?
(Anyway, I'd be ready to bet they did it more to save money than to save the planet...)
Google "England street lights part night lighting". Most (all?) councils in England now switch off some lights from either midnight-6am or 1am-5am. A common phrase from the council websites is "lights in selected roads" are switched off, rather than one light in two.
It's done to save money, and the councils admitted as much when they started doing it, but various people trumpet the benefits to wildlife
> switch off some lights from either midnight-6am or 1am-5am.
I see, so it's indeed similar to what I've seen elsewhere in Europe. Well, it usually makes sense, at least at the place I saw it (rural northern Germany): At midnight, when half the street lights were switched off, nobody had been using that road anymore for hours (country road in the fields, nearest village a couple miles away), neither on foot nor even in any kind of vehicle. And even then, they only switched off half of them, so if you were to go for a walk at 2 am in the freezing cold, you would still be able to see enough to not break your neck. I guess in your case it's just a tuning issue.
Yes, indeed, the reason is (as always) money, not carbon footprint, benefits to wildlife, or to please amateur astronomers...
That brings back some memories - but the girl in the canoe going through the waterfall was always my favourite...
Of course that could be because I was 14 and full of hormones at the time! Some things tend to stay with you :)
To be honest, I think the flake ads were more about the enjoyment women get from chocolate than the titilation the men were getting from watching them - who knows what the lizard symbolised... probably something emotional that we don't understand, lol
(better add the joke icon in case people take this too seriously, sorry Dabbsy, no beer for you this week)
Why on earth would an app designed to allow the flash on a mobile phone to be used as a torch REQUIRE rights to your location?
Turn the right off, app worketh not. Flight mode? App worketh not.
No, it didn't have an option to turn on every street lamp within a half mile radius.
That's because most of those barely-deserving-of-the-name-apps are purely money makers. They want all the access so they can sell the details on. There's plenty around with only the required permissions to do the job. F-Droid is a good starting place to find stuff that doesn't take the piss over permission grabbing.
My typing helper says I've posted this before, but whatever: inspired by the "Top of the Form" sketch in said stage show, I have been known to make all the answers to annoying verification questions be "Pork!".
Another possibility is to give all the answers as the name of the company asking the questions. At least you won't easily forget that.
I think it was my previous ISP who went through a Q&A verification. Unfortunately the help desk didn't realise I was expecting them to ask my submitted unique question - which would trigger me to the appropriate personal answer. They wanted me to give them both the question and the answer as the verification.
We had to play Twenty Questions before I guessed which question I had used for them.
...in many case for me. Click here to find your nearest branch, the website says breathlessly. It then highlights the nearest three branches, all less than one mile away and helpfully shows a map indicating they are all across the river, about a 10 mile drive to get to, while not bothering to mention the one 1.5 miles in the other direction that really is just 1.5 miles drive away. And that is EVERY site I've every come across that indicates "nearest" locations for ${thing}. Considering that many if not most large cities, ie the largest population centres, are almost all on one side of a river or the other (or straddling one) in most countries, you'd think that these locator algorithms might have been tweaked to take rivers into account by now. Where is the much vaunted AI when it could actually be useful? Oh yeah, it doesn't actually exist yet. We'll just have to carry on assuming everyone has flying cars.
Routing algorithms can be strange. Almost all route-finding sites want to take me through a notorious bottleneck for any destination to the SW. Almost anyone local will take an alternative route. I'd turn right out of my gate for either their route or the right one but that variation of their route goes over a weight-limited stretch of road. Their version would have me turn left. Taking that option I'd have to turn right at the end of the road. That's a sharp reflex angle. They have me turn left and then do a reverse turn at a side road a few hundred yards further on.
Clearly they're coming up with an HGV route which I suppose is better than coming up with a car route for an HGV driver.
None of that, however, explains the situation some years ago where at least one site came up with a route which turned off their preferred route, headed of to a rad with a dead end a few miles further along and a few hundred yards later turned in what is, in fact, a private yard to head back to pick up their route again.
A few days ago we went to the Black Country Museum in Dudley. All the sites recommended a route for the last few miles leaving the dual carriageway and going through what looked like some sort of rat-run. It worked as a route but it's difficult to say why. Can anyone who knows the area explain why they would recommend turning off the A463 onto Vulvan Street etc rather than carrying on to the end and then taking the A4123?
My experience with my SatNav is choosing Fastest, Shortest or Eco routes. I've never used the Eco route option, but the SatNav will choose one route over another based on the slightest apparent benefit, eg it's 20 seconds quicker (Fastest) or 20 yds shorter (Shortest) assuming perfect conditions. I assume the Eco route option will try to avoid too many junctions, roundabouts and traffic lights, ie minimise the times you need to stop and start.
I have known it, on occasions when set to "shortest route", try to send me down a back lane because it's one side of a triangle, the other two sides of the triangle being the main roads, saving me about 70 yds of distance. That was in the early days, maybe 10 years ago when I first bought it. It's had multiple firmware updates and many map updates since. (Which reminds me, it's time to check for the latest map update!)
"Honestly do not understand how they [Google] make money."
By lying. If they collect thousands of datapoints, which they can prove, and hire a ton of machine learning experts, which they can also prove, then they must be able to use that to send ads to those who will most benefit from them, right? In the meantime, they just use the same crap algorithms based on browsing history and search term if applicable. Who knows what all the collected data is for, but eventually the guy who's responsible for thinking up the evil plan will come out and they'll do that.
This works for three reasons:
1. Google runs the ad system as a black box, so it is difficult for someone who pays for advertising to figure out who is really seeing the ads.
2. Companies are really bad at figuring out how useful their advertising budget is. Here's a good two-part summary of people who tried doing the research and all the problems they found, both in advertising itself and in advertisers' approach. It's a podcast but the pages contain transcripts for those who prefer to read text: Part 1 (mostly television advertising) Part 2 (online advertising)
3. Google has purchased almost all of their competition, and the others are either basically the same (Facebook) or didn't claim to be that smart in the first place (Bing ads). So you can't try out other advertising platforms to see if they can track better or don't need to, because you have no choices. Google's is biggest, so they get a lot of business.
You have to realise that the likes of Google don't sell you anything. They sell advertising to advertisers. They have collaborators in their customer firms: those in the advertising departments who wouldn't have a job if they weren't buying advertising. The advertising industry as a whole is, therefore, very good at selling advertising. They can produce some rather one-sided figures to allow their collaborators to "prove" what a good job they're doing because one or two adverts sell something to those who were actually searching for whatever it was that was being sold.
The figures are one-sided because they have no way of counting (and no intention of trying to) those who are so annoyed by having ads this or that product shoved in their faces that they'll go to enormous lengths to seek out an alternative should they want something in that category.
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