Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps? (nytimes.com)
- Reference: 0175179783
- News link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/24/10/02/1744216/did-apple-just-kill-social-apps
- Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/technology/apple-social-apps-contacts-change.html
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/technology/apple-social-apps-contacts-change.html
Don't get my hopes up (Score:5, Insightful)
First, this wouldn't kill social apps, this would kill apps harvesting your address book and put you in the loop. So the headline is bullshit.
Second, I really wish they would kill social apps.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
facebook et all are still coasting on millienals' contacts being freely accessible until ~2012
It's going to be increasingly difficult to start a new social network without the ability to wholesale import their hundreds of contacts and build an advertisin-I mean social empir- I mean network with that information.
Apple is doing nothing new here, boomers were supremely successful at pulling the ladder up after them, why wouldn't they have learned from that?
Re: (Score:2)
Boomers didn't pull up the ladder after them. The world changed.
Don't worry GenXers, the GenZers will blame you for whatever ladder you pulled up after you (when the world changed), as the Boomers are now all over 60 and not relevant to anything "modern". Probably AI.
Re: (Score:2)
> Boomers didn't pull up the ladder after them. The world changed.
Bullshit. The world changed, and who do you think changed it? Who controlled the economy in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s? Who do you think still has the most seats in Congress? Boomers are like 20% of the population now but have over 48% of the seats in Congress.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with the meaning you are trying to express. But no the Boomers were *not* in charge in the 80's. Thats the greatest generation's heyday. I'd put the 90's as being the boomers ascension. So shout out to Greatest generation, you dead people also suck.
Re:Don't get my hopes up (Score:4, Funny)
Betteridge's law of headlines fits perfectly here.
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
Re:Don't get my hopes up (Score:5, Insightful)
> First, this wouldn't kill social apps, this would kill apps harvesting your address book and put you in the loop. So the headline is bullshit.
Also, I'm pretty sure those apps always have to ask for permission to the address book, usually in the context of, "to help you find your friends on our network". I always opt out of that, so they've gotten zero contacts from me from the get go.
Being able to select a subset of my contacts to share with the app would be excellent! And it would actually INCREASE the number of contacts I've shared with various apps.
Re: (Score:3)
It really needs to be an OS controlled interface. Hopefully Apple and Google can create something so an app can request access to a contact and it pops up a system app that lets you share which ones you want.
For example, I wanted to transfer a ticket to a show I bought with a friend, but to do that, the TicketMaster App needs an email/contact info. The option currently is to allow access to your entire contacts list for the one email. I ended up just typing in the email.
Re: (Score:2)
I believe the expression "don't threaten me with a good time" is apt.
Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
Any social network that relies on knowing my contacts without my permission deserves to fail. I see no downside at all.
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Insightful)
The greedy bastards want to monetize your data while giving nothing in return (except maybe a minor addiction to their bullshit product).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No social network needs this, unless you count WhatsApp as a social network in which case it absolutely requires it.
Re: (Score:1)
It also doesn't. WhatsApp works without phone book access, you only need to use a special URL to add new numbers and won't see the names of your contacts. But you can chat.
Planning their own social app then? (Score:2)
Sounds like a terrible idea, but that's a typical reason to impede others
Re:Planning their own social app then? (Score:4, Interesting)
> Planning their own social app then?
Apple has [1]tried and failed before [wikipedia.org].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping
Re: (Score:2)
#eWorldRefugee
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting, didn't remember that! Well, there's always opportunity to try and fail again :)
Re: (Score:3)
Apple already tried their hand at a social network. That it was totally forgotten about is the sum total of their success in the realm.
Now, that was almost 15 years ago, and involved iTunes, which they've largely abandoned...but I don't think they would really need to go down that road. iMessage has a good amount of elements of a social network; add in public group chats, and you've basically got a hardware-specific Whatsapp.
Apple makes their money off software and media sales in the App Store; unless they'
Re: (Score:2)
If Apple did try to create a new social app after putting this restriction in place, and it didn't abide by the same restrictions, they would deserve a visit from anti-trust.
As long as they don't do both of the above, I like the idea of selective contact sharing - "grant access to all of contacts" has caused me to refuse to install a lot of things.
Sounds Like a Good Thing (Score:4, Insightful)
I often want to share selective contacts and not the whole book. I'm glad one company, at least, is making this easier. I hope others will follow.
Don't like the sensationalized title on this story. One person's "Killing Social Apps" is another person's "Restoring Privacy and Control".
Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would anybody grant a social app permission to harvest contacts in the first place?
Re: (Score:2)
> Why would anybody grant a social app permission to harvest contacts in the first place?
Instant gratification. Once someone joins they want to see activity.
Re: (Score:2)
For a while you could give Facebook your IMAP credentials to harvest your contacts and several of my acquaintances jumped in with both feet.
"Trust me, bro".
Stop monetizing my private business (Score:4, Informative)
This is long overdue. We all know that these "social apps" have been exploiting our information in many ways. We're tired of it. If the developers are upset over this change, they are free to find another job--write something that doesn't exploit the public. Do honest work.
Makes slightly me more likely to try them (Score:3)
I don't do social apps. Never made a FB account, stopped using Xitter after some asshole ruined it, am not even sure what other ones there are now.
If I could actually control what data they could harvest, I would be more likely to try them. As is, I never even look because I know exactly what kind of shenanigans to expect.
I still probably don't care about your wizzy new social whatever. But control over personal data would take it out of the automatic No category for me.
whatever (Score:1)
Sharing your contacts with social apps is wild.
Can I get ... (Score:2)
... a list of all the startups Nikita Bier is involved with? I'd like to avoid anything that attempts to profit from my multiple (and separate) networks of friends.
Show me his contact list.
Sharing the hate (Score:3)
Sounds good to me. It is not uncommon to have contacts that you don't actually like and would not like a social app knowing about, such as ex-partners or coworkers etc. Likewise with email you may have a blacklist for spam management and the last thing you would want is a social app linking you to those scumbags.
The worst offender was, a few years ago, LinkedIn asking for access to your email account so it could scrape all your emails. The only thing more crazy than that request was some people probably gave them access. The repeated requests when I did not give access really pissed me off at the time.
Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies. (Score:2)
> While Apple touts this as a privacy enhancement, developers warn it may hinder the growth of new social platforms.
So, we've got us one of them win-win situations here. Cool.
Except, social media apps will absolutely still exist. The difference is that they'll have to find ways to actively seek out information other than just, "You happen to know some dumbass who has no problem sharing any information you've ever given them." Thinking these companies will just disappear in a puff of wish fulfillment just because you cut off one tiny little bit of their data-suck? No. You're removing about 1/3rd or less of their data-suck
Advantage Apple's own Services? (Score:3)
Which ones? The phone dialer? Mail? Messages? The whole reason I put those people in my contacts was so I could use it with those.
LOL (Score:2)
LOL, cry about it, parasites.
\o/ (Score:1)
That's great - time to switch to iOS so I can install the LinkedIn app!
Less data for the dataminers (Score:2)
No, it will not hinder anything legitimate.
Having to add people by handle but by sending your address book to a commercial company was totally normal, then came WhatsApp and went the evil route. Some other apps adapted, thinking they could catch up to WhatsApp if they abandoned user handles in favor for mobile numbers. They didn't.
Apple didn't kill social apps. They saved user's privacy.
Betteridge (Score:3, Insightful)
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." Still true.
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Assholes need to stop monetizing my friendships.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
100% agree. The sooner we make harvesting personal information a liability the better.
Re: Good (Score:4, Informative)
Grapheneos started doing this several years back in response to whatsapp. It's really obnoxious about the way it demands access to all of your contacts. Though they've done this to other "all or nothing" accesses as well, e.g. you can grant apps access only to specific files. You define scopes for e.g. contacts and storage that effectively mask everything but what you allow, then assign those scopes to whatever apps. The app will think it has full access even though it doesn't.
Re: (Score:3)
To make things easier for families/groups and such, it would be helpful to be able to define some preset filters, so you can share "D&D contacts" and such with the apps that need those kind of things without having to hunt and peck per contact
Re: Good (Score:3)
I don't know about ios, but grapheneos you can, you just name your scopes. The app can't tell the difference so it can't play hardball and try to penalize you in any way like whatsapp does if you don't give it access to your contacts. Only thing you have to do is add somebody to its scope before you can call or message them for the first time.
Re: Good (Score:4, Funny)
Access to my contacts is why I haven't used WhatsApp EVER. I have people ask for my WhatsApp and I tell them I don't have it and aren't interested in adding it, and they look at me like I'm some sort of weird boomer. Okay, so I am a weird boomer, but that is irrelevant to this subject ;-)
Re: Good (Score:2)
They can call you but you can't call them if you don't give it access to your contacts. Initially this is the way I was doing that, but refrained from ever calling anybody. Then when I found out grapheneos provides a way to do this without root (and a number of other things like call recording) I just switched to it.
Re: (Score:2)
> Access to my contacts is why I haven't used WhatsApp EVER.
Same... or rather nearly the same. In my case I haven't been able to use WhatsApp, because I refuse to give it access to my contacts. Although that's the end of the journey.
That started when I installed the app on my laptop, and it told me to "scan this QR code on your phone". If I had had a smartphone I wouldn't have needed to install it on my laptop...
Fast forward to my phone carrier switching off 2g, thus sending me a new sim so I can still make calls, send texts etc. Old phone can't take new sim, so I f
Re: (Score:2)
I used to use distinct email addresses for every business I interacted with, and they pretty much stopped widely sharing email lists well over 15 years ago. I don't bother with it these days, though all those legacy addresses do give me early warning someone is about to be in the news because of a data breach.