Posts by JohnFen 5648 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2015
"Register your domain, most registrar will also offer a service to send your email to a different address, and it won't cost you more than $10-20 per year."
This is what I do, but my registrar does the email forward for free. I also run my own mailserver which is where the email gets forwarded to. These days, there are even prebuilt mailserver images available, so doing it yourself is easy if you're a "power user".
"But if you pull email into a different email program, you will instead be presented with a link to the Gmail message."
Which is the same as not using email. I might respond to such a notification, but it would be to tell the sender "I can't see your message." Or, more likely, I'd just ignore it.
My friends and family know me well enough to know that I don't want to be mentioned or have data about me included in Facebook. When I discover someone has made a mistake (usually because someone tells me), I scold them to remind them.
It's certainly not a solution to everything, but it does at least help.
"It is unrealistic to expect that any Facebook user will have a means to filter their non-Faceboook contact when uploading them"
True. My hope is that people will either not upload their contact list, or they will remove me from their contact list if they can't help themselves.
"and also that they will use a codeword (e.g. notJohnFen) when mentioning you in their posts."
Why would they need a codeword? They can simply not mention me at all.
"they just don't care, I don't think it has changed their usage of the system at all."
Which is fine, that's their right. However, I think that those of us who do despise it (and other such surveillance companies) need to start calling those people out as assholes when they share any data about people who aren't on Facebook and who haven't given them permission to share.
This not only includes the obvious (name-checking in posts, photos, etc.), but the things that are often overlooked (sharing phone contact lists, and so forth).
If people want to use these services, I see no reason to stop them. But they absolutely have to stop throwing everyone else under the bus when they do.
You and he aren't really having a debate -- the points you're making aren't addressing the points he's making.
His complaint is that as a non-FB user, Facebook is storing data about him without his consent and he has no way to rectify that situation. Nothing you've said indicates that his point is invalid. All you're saying is "that's the way it is," which nobody is disputing -- indeed, his primary complaint is that that's the way it is.
"unless I deliberately allow some through to reward a favoured site"
Under no circumstances am I going to stop blocking tracking for any site, no matter how much I appreciate it. I'll kick them a few bucks every now and again if they have a means to do so, but not lift the blocks. I figure that it's fair, as any site that exposes me to tracking is a site that is showing me a large measure of disrespect.
"LinkedIn are even more annoyingly insidious at this point."
Facebook is the biggest target right now, but your fundamental point is correct. The real problem here is that too much of the tech sector has hitched its wagon to data mining as a means of social control and profit. All companies that behave this way are bad actors and need to be brought down.
But, if people begin to reject Facebook's use of these techniques, it will make it that much easier to make the rest of such companies either begin to be socially responsible or go out of business.
"ask yourself: why am I wasting my time surfing this Web of Shit?"
This. I use NoScript rather than uMatrix, but the same principle applies. If I visit a site that doesn't work with my settings, and there isn't an extreme need to access that particular site, I just move on.
It's the safest and easiest way of handling it, and really, I lose nothing in doing so.
"The person who uploaded the photo (presumably one of your "friends" in real life) - and they **didn't** have to ask for your consent "
You're talking legalities here, when I think people are generally more concerned with what's right and wrong.
Personally, I'd be absolutely furious at any of my friends who uploaded a photo of me to any online service -- and especially Facebook or a Facebook company -- without my consent. Because doing so is just wrong.
"I'm sorry but the level of your ignorance is really a bigger problem than any "naughty stuff" Facebook are doing."
Bullshit. That non-Facebook users aren't experts in how Facebook works isn't a problem. The problem is that Facebook is a plague, and it's not unreasonable to suspect them of doing what they have consistently shown over years that they are so eager to do: spy on everybody.
"Most of the silent majority can't be bothered to install any app at all"
I never install a new app that I didn't right myself without some serious consideration, research, and weighing of how much I actually need to have the app installed. Given the state of apps these days, to do otherwise is risky.
"I think its reasonable to have a few platform wide gestures."
Sure, but there needs to be a button-based method available as well. I think gestures are a pain in the ass in many circumstances. I don't mind if they exist, but I mind a lot if they're the only way of accomplishing a task.
Yes. Gestures may be fine as an optional way of interacting, but they should not be the primary or only way of interacting.
"anything that sounds like it won an award for being clever is going to end up being poor UX."
Well, to be fair, a poor UXes seem to be in fashion these days.
"maybe you're best off getting a headless fag-packet sized computer"
I've been putting a lot of thought into what I'm going to replace my current smartphone with. I think I'll have to within the next year or two.
The problem is this -- I use my smartphone more as a portable computer than a phone, but every new generation of phone in this class is worse than the one that came before (no headphone jack, no replaceable battery, no SD card slot, etc.). Very few of them actually meet my needs anymore, and it doesn't look like this situation is likely to change.
So, I've been seriously considering the exact thing you recommend here -- buying a low-end phone that can serve as a hotspot, and carrying an actual pocket computer to do everything not phone-related.
I find it a bit sad that we're reverting to the days when it was necessary to carry multiple devices. The big win with smartphones was that it eliminated that problem. But, here we are.
" they can ignore more altruistic standards bodies and dictate their own standards through sheer market power."
Which "more altruistic" standards bodies are being ignored? I don't think the W3C counts as an "altruistic standards body". It's as much a case of corporations dictating standards through corporate power as WHATWG. The only difference is that it involves more corporations, and therefore the standards it comes up with are more problematic.
Innovation is a great and wonderful thing, but as a society we seem to have fetishized it to a dangerous degree. Innovation must be balanced against other things, such as security and the impact on society.
The idea that anything that slows down innovation is automatically a bad thing is an erroneous, and dangerous, concept.
" there is an alarming number of genuinely useful apps that are legitimately useless if you don't allow them network access. What then?"
If it's an app the requires network access to perform its intended function, then you have to decide for yourself if the utility you get from it is worth the security risk.
If it requires network access just because, then either find a different app that doesn't (it probably exists), don't use it at all, or decide it's worth the security risk. Although in that case, you have an advantage in that you know for certain that it's an app that spies on you.
Plus, you always have the option of just not using an app, no matter how useful it may be. Personally, an app the spies on my is useless to me no matter what it does.
"which "firewalled" app is prevented from launching the system browser at the URL "http://www.shadysite.com/?ScrewNetworkPermissions=true&UsersPhoneNumber=123456"...?"
None, of course, but there are ways of handling that, too. For instance, you can firewall your browsers off and only whitelist them temporarily when you actually intend to use them.
In the end, this is the same old security tradeoff -- security and convenience. How much of each is right for you is a call only you can make. But you can't really have both.
I'll take a stab at this as an Android developer.
First, the answer to any such question that begins with "is it possible" is most likely yes. The real question is how hard is it to subvert the security measures.
The way that Android permissions works is that it should not be possible to bypass the permissions the user sets. However, there are sometime multiple paths to get to the same data (your example of the Accessibility permissions is a good one), so users can be in a situation where they've denied permissions for one thing, but allowed a different permission that unknowingly allows access to the same data they intended to deny.
The Android permissions system is a bit of a mess in multiple ways. Carefully used, it is effective, but there are some gotchas in there that are easily stepped into by ordinary users. Also, the permissions are still too coarse -- you may want to allow an app a specific sort of access, but the app must be granted much broader permissions than just that in order to allow it the narrow access you want.
My general recommendation (this is what I do on my own devices) is to use a firewall to prevent apps from talking to the network at all by default, then whitelist the specific ones that you really need to be able to communicate. That way, errors in permissions-granting are less problematic. It doesn't matter if an app gets access to, say, your address book if that app can't transmit that data out of your phone.
"Not making the link directly clickable would then exclude half of the worlds population from being able to complete the task."
Baloney. The email itself could even include instructions for that.
But, at some point, people have to be expected to learn minimal skills for using the internet. The alternative is the nightmare version of the internet that it's slowly transforming into right now.
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