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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

So I install a random app that includes PingJam. Another flashlight app or something.

So the flashlight app then goes and monitors my phone calls, intercepts them to display ads (at no point is it clear that the app is responsible for that) and probably relays my called numbers to PingJam?

Are you fucking kidding me? It's straight malware and you should be fined triple for every dollar you ever made. Google should fire whoever inside their organization enabled you to run this scam for longer than a month.

(Anyone still have the SDK or an app that used this? I'd love to see if it leaked caller ids to them. Holy privacy invasion.)

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I really hate being this cynical, but I dare say they were simply ahead of the curve. The over-under on google doing this themselves? Two years?

The article states that it happened immediately after Google released a very similar feature on Android.

Is this what they did? I check out their site and was unable to find out where and when exactly were they showing ads and which data were collected from phones and send to advertizers.

Never mind, the "We show an ad only in the context of a call to or from a business." in their faq http://pingjam.com/faq/ is probably what you mean. So, I guess I will suddenly see ads if they detect I'm calling to business, but I will have no idea which app caused it. Genial.

I would not knowing install app that does that.

If only I could filter playstore by permissions. That would make it that much more usable. As it is now, it take too much time to scroll down till first app that does not require too many of them.

Or control better what kind of data applications see. Anything would be better then current "we pretend you are in control, but will make it as hard as possible for you to exercise that control."

End of rant.

Dude, chill. Apps using Pingjam displayed a very concise and clear explanation of the caller Id functionality at startup, including a screenshot, and activated it only if the user explicitly agreed to it. Ads appeared only on calls which were identified (I.e. when you got value from it), and the ads were always relevant to the call (e.g. when you called a spa you were offered a coupon for spa treatments) Every caller id screen and every ad had clear attribution to the app that brought it, plus a button to immediately opt out of the service.

Here's a screenshot I found of the permissions screen (http://blog.andromo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/pingjam-d...).

There's no screenshot of the type of ads I'm going to get and the actions are not clear whether I'm "OK"ing acknowledgment or if I am enabling the ads. To an average user who doesn't want to read, I would expect them to just press OK because it seems like a standard first time user startup screen. Would "cancel" close the app? I wouldn't be surprised if most opt-ins were not truly intentional.

To me this is a dark pattern. The notification should have clearly asked "Would you like to enable caller ads?" and "Yes" or "No".

I'm an iPhone user, so take this with a grain of salt, but it is utterly incomprehensible to me that a phone OS would allow an application I install to "monitor my phone calls [and] intercepts them to display ads"

You fucking kidding me? And you paid money for this phone?

There are some pretty powerful permissions that apps can request. This allows interesting apps to exist that can't be done on iOS.

It's up to users to not install apps that request permissions they don't agree with, although that is indeed not presented ideally.

> Google should fire whoever inside their organization enabled you to run this scam for longer than a month.

From the post, it sounds like Google is itself running this "scam":

> FTA: I don’t know whether we got kicked out because 24 hours before banning our apps Google launched an almost identical feature in Android 4.4 or if it’s something else.

[Can anyone confirm?]

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