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by briancooley
5422 days ago
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One of the things that Reto Meier talked about at Google I/O this year is building apps that are "Psychic," e.g., using things like Contacts on the phone to make the user experience less painful. However, he cautioned against being too psychic because it might make users uneasy about what else is being accessed. One of the things I like about the Facebook Android app (and by extension any Android app) is that you can go to the settings and see what permissions you granted the app when you installed it. In contrast, you can't tell whether an iOS app can access your contacts list. Given the recent history of Facebook with respect to privacy, I'm not surprised that this bit of software magic was considered by the user base as something nefarious. |
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This is a theme I've come up against before. I worked for a company that did e-billing. When you signed up, it would go through the list of bills it was pretty sure were yours (because the billers would submit them, and it would match them against your profile information), display those, and then a list of bills that you PROBABLY had (companies that had a monopoly in your area, bills from companies that people LIKE you had, bills most people get, etc.) and display those under a different heading.
People FREAKED OUT. They'd call and wonder HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW WHAT BILLS I HAVE!?, in no uncertain terms.
Eventually, we had to "mix them up" and put ALL the bills into one big display, including bills that we were pretty certain you DIDN'T have (like Florida utilities for a Nebraska customer), just to give the customer the feeling that we weren't THAT psychic.