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by jimmies 3169 days ago
If you trust those """services""" to be secure and trust that they care about your privacy, then you will be betrayed sooner or later, in ways you can't think of -- just like in the article.

Fun fact, years ago I accidentally found out that my girlfriend at the time cheated on me on Snapchat, without me actually exploiting anything. She told me to join it with her, telling me that is going to be fun. Snapchat kept track of useds' activity and gamified it to incentivize you by scoring your activity then. Each person has a public activity score when you tap on their profile. One day, I noticed that her Snapchat had more than twice the score that I had. So I clicked on her profile and there it is some strange dude having a score higher than me, it turned out that was her """"ex"""" (I actually never asked her even for his name before, I found out only after that). I never consciously looked for anything, I trusted her 100%, the score was just there on my screen.

Thanks Snapchat for their stupid gamification efforts, otherwise I would have wasted more time on her. But since that accident, I never trust proprietary shit that has money to make, ads to sell, governments to please, and incentives to grow, even it says its selling point is to protect your privacy, like Snapchat. It's not about the "end to end encryption" or "finer privacy control" or "only allow when app is in foreground" or "restricted sharing" or "MIT open sauce license" or "export your data" or "only listening to hotwords" or "open APIs," it's about the intent. If the intent was to expand and make money, then all those techs won't be the magic pill that suddenly cures the ill intent. Anyway, privacy my ass, man.

2 comments

Wait, when you view her profile (as a friend), it shows who has the highest 'score' in terms of contact with her? Wow, that IS a lot of data if they break it down by contact pairs.
Snapchat used to publicly display each person's "best friends" list, but not anymore.
Yep. It was called Snapchat score or something. It had a list of top 3 people or so and how much score they had with each other. It was unreal.

This was back in spring-summer 2015.

Now it shows you the live current location of all your friends, no one I know has it turned off.

Wth people?

This setting doesn't seem to be enabled by default, at least on Android. I just scrolled into settings > Who can... See My Location >

Found it to be on "ghost mode (only me)." I never touched this setting before.

Only log me, but don't let my friends know: You know your privacy is respected jack shit when the least intrusive setting is letting the service know and log you, but not letting your friends know.

The real question isn't that what it sets by default, the question is why that chat app needs to know and log your location in the first place? Why does it not only get it and send it when you choose to share? What kind of enhancement does it give to your fucking """experience""" when it logs your location like that?

@cassowary, geotagging your photos can be done without logging your location on the server. It can be done locally. Plus, I thought that Snapchat does not keep the pictures you've taken? (I have been out of that since then, so I don't know.)
I'm not by any means a Snapchat power user. But I really like the way my phone tells me where my normal photos are taken — it makes it very easy to find the photos. Also, any chat app would benefit because it's very easy for me to remember "i was talking about foo with Bar when I was over in Baz", but much harder for me to remember when that happened. So to me location tracking would offer many useful features. (They may not be worth it, and even the useful ones might not be available, but those aren't answers to the question you asked.)
In Snapchat your location is used for the geofilters, I guess that's why they have to get your location. I do think they should have an option to turn off geofilters and not use your location at all though.
If you use the map it asks you if you want to turn it on, most people click through it looks like. Now someone write a PoC to keep a log of where everyone goes.
Dude was just curious, what services do you use now ?