Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Then you might as well stop using your smartphone and all 3rd party apps on it.

The vast majority contain SDKs which tattle your whereabouts, contacts and other interesting tidbits to advertising networks.

View on HN

Or, you might as well start paying for the apps you use (like more than $1) :)

The vast majority of FREE 3rd party apps have tracking SDK, that is an important distinction. I mean really, what did you expect, the developers of those apps giving them for free in exchange for nothing? (the fact that they hide this is another discussion)

Serious question... Is there any data on usage of tracking for paid vs free apps?

There are plenty of cookie onboarding vendors who will pay a monthly recurring CPM rate for mobile logins that they can match against and they do not require you to show ads.

So if the majority of users are not privacy aware and would just accept whatever permissions are requested, what is the disincentive for a paid app to include these trackers and add a recurring revenue stream?

None, and quite a few do.

I know, but do you happen to have any data to reference that actually breaks down the % who do vs. those who don't? Obviously that would be messy data, but I'm genuinely curious as to what the adoption rate is for those sorts of things.

I actually don't know much about mobile app traffic analysis, so I'm not sure how easy that is to sniff.

Nowadays, even middle-end, high-end apps that cost hundred of $, will track you anytime you do something with them (ie: Autodesk, Adobe...).

Then you might as well stop using your smartphone and all 3rd party apps on it.

...Is probably the right answer.

Unfortunately, if you want a phone that actually works these days, you're basically stuck with iOS or Android devices, and all the junk that implies.

If I could buy a modern dumbphone that just works as a phone, with decent components so it has good reception and reliability, and ignore the whole smartphone fiasco altogether, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

You can buy a phone like that, they are usually advertised for rural use

edit: or you can make one http://zerophone.org/ which also has plans to crowdfund some pre-built phones

I'd love to, but as someone who has spent a lot of time looking recently, it's certainly not easy to find anything suitable here in the UK. You can get dumbphones, but getting a good dumbphone, with reliable reception and decent battery life, is a different question altogether.

If you want anything at all beyond basic features, like say a dual SIM option for use when travelling, you're straight into high-end smartphone territory, even if you actually have no interest in the so-called smart parts of the device.

My $20 Wiko Lubi has dual SIM. Never had problems with its reception or battery life, either. Audio quality, on the other hand...

Dual (or even triple, and I've seen 4 and 5 too) SIMs is pretty much standard on phones, dumb or smart, intended for the Asia market, mostly produced by various small companies based on the standard Mediatek platform, but you can buy those online.

I could put you in my will and leave my Nokia to you, I'm fairly sure it will still work by that time :)

I do cyagenomod(lineageos) with all the Google stripped out. A terminal, ssh, Firefox mobile, and a YouTube apk with ads stripped. This is why privacy respecting Foss and the four freedoms are important. Eventually people will wake up as the surveillance state becomes more abrasively obvious to even the lay-user.

> and a YouTube apk with ads stripped

Doesn't the YouTube app still rely on Google Play Services?

Anyway, if you still want to watch YouTube without Google, I'd recommend NewPipe on F-Droid. [0]

It's awesome. You can download videos to local storage for later watching, play music headless in the background, and there are no ads!

[0] https://f-droid.org/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/

I don't know know where you live, but Nokia has released a new version of the Nokia 3310 in some places (not the USA yet, though).

Or just use cyanogen privacy guard to send random fake data.

Would love a source for the "vast majority" part. I doubt hardly any of the apps I use on a regular basis do this, assuming I even give them those permissions.

It is a cynical opinion often repeated, but is not true. Many apps use analytics but limit it to data such as crash information and device hardware / OS version.

There are absolutely other apps which perform tracking similar to AccuWeather, but not many (on iOS anyway).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com