Nick Heer

A company gets to decide what business it's in (Facebook and Google have each explored several), what its ethics are, and how these ethics apply. For example, Google is in a substantially similar business, but it is interesting to contrast Facebook's pattern of behavior with Google's.

Google isn't a paragon, and it's alarming (to me) that Google is building a universal panopticon too. But these two companies, despite the similarity in their business models, appear very different with respect not just to how they collect data, what they collect, how much they sell, and what breaches or not-breach breaches have occurred, but also how forthcoming they are about all this, and whether they act like they've got something to hide. Facebook used tricks[1] to run their iPhone app in the background when requested not to, and only backed this out when the new iOS “battery shaming” feature outed them; they uploaded Android call history with text that mislead the user into thinking they were just uploading contacts. Google has made mis-steps and knows a scary amount about us, but I don't recall this kind of systematic boundary-pushing and post-discovery obfuscation and denial.

Or contrast Lyft and Uber.

These differences in behavior aren't from a difference in business models. They are from differences in “corporate DNA”, or culture. Zuckerberg was a teen when he wrote these messages[2], but most people I know don't speak or act like that even at that age. Some people advance to a…

> Maybe make it 2 weeks or “smart” and taking into account how often the app is really using that permission.

If it were smart, it would have a "Never Again" option.

Nick Heer argues that these dialogs are not even effective for unsophisticated users, especially when they occur repeatedly: https://pxlnv.com/blog/permissions-pollution/

> I do not think this new prompt succeeds in helping users make an informed decision. There is no information in the dialog’s text informing you who the developer is, and if it has changed. It does not appear the text of the dialog can be customized for the developer to provide a reason. If this is thrown by an always-running app like Bartender, a user will either become panicked or begin passively accepting this annoyance.

> The latter is now the default response state to a wide variety of alerts and cautions. Car alarms are ineffective. Hospitals and other medical facilities are filled with so many beeps staff become “desensitized”. People agree to cookie banners without a second of thought. Alert fatigue is a well-known phenomenon

My RSS reader has been pretty stale for a good while now, and I do hope we might see some other good suggestions here so I can get some fresh ideas and people into my RSS reader.

These are some of my favourite blogs.

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Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/feed/

This blog is pretty well know for doing round ups for tech and tech-adjacent news with quotes from twitter and blogs.

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n-gate.com http://n-gate.com http://n-gate.com/index.rss

At risk of getting called out I'm including this here, pretty much each week they present an alternative view on the discussion of the top hacker news post. It takes a certain kind of humor, but it also puts things into a nice perspective I think.

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Pixel Envy https://pxlnv.com https://pxlnv.com/feed

The blogging here is a little Apple focused, but there's also a lot of news and takes on the ever increasing intrusions to online privacy.

I have no particular beef with Dorsey but I think this would make sense. He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.

I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: will it be someone with smart ideas or someone to serve as a puppet of activist investors? I can't find a source right now but I remember at the time Fleets were launched (Twitter's since-removed version of Stories) that the feature was pushed heavily by investors rather than anyone inside the company. If that's true then the next CEO could be a true disaster.

EDIT: ah, there we are: https://pxlnv.com/linklog/twitter-fleets-elliott-management/, and a deeper read on Elliot Management: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-doomsday-investor

The Bloomberg story referenced in your [0] was refuted by pretty much everyone and independently confirmed by no one. See [1]. It was not retracted by the authors but the consensus seems to be it is intelligent speculation rather than confirmed fact. In particular the quote you pulled seems like a garbled and further exaggerated secondary source based on the unvalidated Bloomber article. Note the incorrect technical word usage ("encrypted" is not a correct verb to describe how a chip could be integrated into a motherboard design) and the implausible scope of the allegations (sending literally all data inputted to the laptop to China would be a large obvious datastream that would be quickly noticed and independently confirmed, which has not happened).

[1] https://pxlnv.com/blog/one-year-after-big-hack/

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

> Messages in iCloud also uses end-to-end encryption. If you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your Messages. This ensures you can recover your Messages if you lose access to iCloud Keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple.

https://pxlnv.com/linklog/improving-imessage-encryption/

> During an interview with Apple blogger and Daring Fireball’s owner John Gruber, Federighi said that the company has figured out a way to do syncing while still remaining unable to read your iMessages.