Aperture Labs
The attitude to their users is similar, and they even already have a product called “Portal”.
Posts by Andy Pearce
4 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Nov 2007
Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids
The TRUTH about LEAKY, STALKING, SPYING smartphone applications
Friday 31st January 2014 13:34 GMT
Not convinced about this iOS study
I can't find any source for this study, but this one seems similar: https://www.appthority.com/appreport.pdf
Certainly that study also uses the 96% figure, but this time it claims that they "share data with advertising networks and/or analytics companies", which could just mean anonymised data about the usage of the app. Not ideal, perhaps, but that's quite different from sharing location and contacts information.
What these studies fail to do, however, is take account of the fundamentally different approach to permissioning between iOS and Android - iOS allows you to install an app but then deny permission later, so it's quite possible that most users simply deny the permission - this would skew the results quite significantly. I've used plenty of apps which function quite happily if denied access to optional services such as contacts lists.
This article discusses this issue in more detail: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/20/android-apps-permission-app-ops
Adblock developer offers 'please unblock me' tag to sites
Tuesday 12th May 2009 14:21 GMT
Just remove subscriptions
If Adblock Plus removed the ability to subscribe to someone else's block list, that would go a long way to achieving these goals already. That would require positive action on the part of the user to block annoying ads, which would naturally pre-select the most intrusive ones without any action required on the part of publishers.
As it stands, if you subscribe to EasyList, for example, you get force-fed someone else's idea of "bad" advertising, and I suspect this will always tend towards blocking anything that's even vaguely ad-related, irrespective of merit.
Someone had to build that list in the first place, so why should users then have to poke holes in it? Just require each user to build their own list and be done with it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
