[mysteria]

I mean from a privacy perspective alone its clear that Meta throws its ethics out the door in that regard. There's the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the more recent incident with Instagram bypassing Android OS restrictions for more tracking, and many many other examples.

Their apps also regularly nag you to allow access to stuff like contacts and the photo gallery when you've already said no the first time.

And for a personal anecdote: I was recently helping a senior setup Whatsapp Desktop on her Windows computer. It could chat fine but refused to join calls, displaying an error that said there was no microphone connected. I mean, there is a mic connected and it could record voice notes fine. Turns out that error actually meant that there was no webcam connected, and a webcam is required to join calls. I think it's the same way in the mobile app where you need to give it the camera permission to join a video call even if you turn the video off. Meanwhile Zoom, Teams, Webex, and others allow you to join any call without a mic or camera.

As she didn't have a webcam I first tried the OBS virtual camera but Whatsapp refused to recognize that despite all other apps working fine with it. Somehow Droidcam with no phone connected worked fine, displaying a black screen in the virtual camera feed, and that got Whatsapp to join the call successfully. Absolutely ridiculous and it's clear to me how desperately they want that camera access and that sweet data.

[alex1138]

See, this is why I made a comment in that Apple thread (see my post history) about stopping Facebook doing things like this. I was told "Android can do it too". Yes but no. Apple may do evil things but they punished Facebook for their bullshit, revoking their certificate. The landscape of contact info (phone numbers, email addresses, social media services, people just submitted it, they trust me, dumb f-) means you can't have bad faith actors like Zuckerberg Zucking about. Whatsapp is such a clear case of antitrust just for starters

Edit: sorry, not entirely clear, I mean we need Apple's system of granularity. "Deny access to contacts" needs to work even when the asking company (Facebook) tries tricking people