Maybe we already have enough social media apps, but also maybe the ones we have aren't very good, and things like this probably make it harder to compete in that space if you believe that you can create something better.
Also to be clear, while I'm sympathetic to that idea I'm not sympathetic to garbage people like Nikita Bier, who is basically saying this is what helped enable him to make two identical apps marketed directly to high-schoolers rapidly acquire a substantial userbase. He then subsequently sold these apps to Meta and Discord. So maybe this change is for the best.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/12rqnk6/nikit...
The inability of users to prevent companies from slurping up all of their contacts creates an environment which greatly benefits those company which simply take the data since nobody can stop them.
Yes having that data has allowed the current crop of social media companies to grow very quickly, but look at the societal costs of that rapid growth. If we want social media companies of a categorically different kind, we need different rules so that the kind we currently have don't dominate again.
On the contrary, it allows users to better than current "all or nothing" which today leaves users holding their nose and feeling forced by social monopolies into feeding their entire graph to resell to advertisers, data brokers, government monitors, and the like.
Note that a minority of social apps have done the work to match your contacts with your contacts' affirmative disclosure on the social network, without giving themselves new shadow contacts from your phonebook. Only those who "want to be found" will match up.
> So maybe this change is for the best.
It's possible to ... slurp respectfully?
If everyone did that, this feature wouldn't be needed. If EU wanted to legislate something, they could mandate something like an extrovert flag: this is my name tag, I want to be found! Given an app respecting this method of matching, then allow matching to be seamless after the first OS level prompt.
It's a real bummer for the user experience, honestly. Yes, people can say "share all contacts", but the user experience is confusing, and many people won't.
This means that all 3rd party mail and messaging apps will be lacking contact information -- whereas of course Apple's own will have it by default.
Again, it's shameful API design by Apple, because they don't have to use their own APIs/permission systems.
This could be mitigated, by the way, by having a rate-limited "lookup" API where an app can say "Can I have the contact for [email protected], if it exists?". Most legit apps don't need a copy of your entire address book, but they may need to query it occasionally.
Let me clear: fuck any app that demands to slurp up all my contacts and purposefully makes it hard to use it without allowing that (looking at you, WhatApp), and any developer who does it. If this is the end of the world for them, good riddance!
This makes sense. I don't want apps to know who my doctor is, especially considering many apps share this data with others (including, in some cases, governments).
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/control-access-to-con...
This seems like a mis-feature to me. iOS shouldn't be lying to apps like this. If an app shouldn't have access to all your contacts (which it shouldn't), then why is Apple approving such an app in the first place? I thought the whole selling point for iOS was the strictly controlled and curated app store.
Apple could totally be more strict with the App Store, and eliminate contact-stealing malware such as:
- FB Messenger
- should I go on?
even when you deny, they'll just ask again later.
At this point, iOS does not allow you to change those permissions in-app once you deny them. The only exception is photo access, which lets the app request access to more photos.
"Even when you deny, enough of your contacts won’t, that it seems in vain."
Alas, it's not when the whole forest is infested with ads^H^H^Htermites
Essentially, it works very much like the feature Apple has introduced for these things, but importantly, it makes apps believe they have full access to these resources, while still maintaining a limited scope through the OS.
I doubt Google would ever adopt this (due to their less than privacy-friendly attitudes) but it is absolutely technically possible, since GrapheneOS has it today.
Also, what if I don’t want my name and contact information in someone’s phone shared with an application? There are no options there.
On iOS they rely on memory, context along with the name and photo sharing feature
Maybe men in the same age range and contexts do the same, but I wouldn’t know
My own contact is by far the most bespoke in my address book: it has multiple numbers, emails and addresses. It also has many "family member" fields filled out (which allows Siri to understand things like "call my youngest sister" or "when is my uncle's birthday").
Apps I don't trust only get the dummy version of me, which just has my spare phone number.
But I guess it would be unwieldy to do this for other people as well.
If you’re sharing your contact card, tap the Show Disclosure Triangle, select the fields you want to include, then tap Save. The same fields will be selected by default next the time you use NameDrop.
https://support.apple.com/en-hk/guide/iphone/iph1b6c664b7/io...
Oh no! Now apps won't be able to suck up all your contacts and do god knows what with them, what a travesty! /s
Good riddance. Every time a social media app moans about an iOS/Android change I count it as a good thing.
At the same time, it's not like LinkedIn is paying any price for that.
So the rule is, engage in as much bad behavior as you can when it's permitted, because later it might not be an option.
A common retort I've seen to that is, "Nobody made any such searches during the conversation." So I try a different route: how does LinkedIn know what's relevant to advertise to you based on conversations that are picked up on your microphone?
Let's assume LinkedIn can isolate the voice of every individual on the planet (or, perhaps more relevant, every individual in your home town) and Alice is talking to you about their new air fryer such that it's picked up by your phone's microphone. LinkedIn might advertise air fryers to you because they think Alice was talking to you about air fryers.
But what if Charlie is telling Dave -- both of whom you don't know and are only near you because you're waiting in line at the grocery store -- about their new air fryer? LinkedIn can advertise air fryers to you but that won't necessarily be so eerily relevant. How would LinkedIn know to show you air fryers because Alice was talking to you about them but not to show you air fryers because Charlie was talking to Dave about them? Both conversations were picked up by your phone's microphone so, ostensibly, they would both be equally relevant for advertising.
(That's all assuming that they can hide the otherwise-inexplicable battery usage of an always-on microphone.)
Not to downplay the creep factor, just pointing out that they are probably not disregarding established audio-recording law and are instead doing other surveillance things to show you such relevant advertisements.
The iPhone has an indicator at the top of the screen that's present during and for several seconds after when any app is using your camera or microphone. Even for built-in system apps like the native camera.
I'd like to think Apple's financial motivation for user trust outweighs whatever money they could be getting by offering backdoors for LinkedIn of all things. Not to mention the lawsuits they could be facing for letting an app listen to users unbeknownst to them for a bit of Microsoft kickback. This is after introducing a user privacy measure that basically undermined the entirety of Facebook's monetization strategy (site that was majority of internet traffic) and forced them to do a major pivot a few years ago.
So if you never gave LinkedIn permission to use your microphone (or did once, but then went into Settings and revoked it), unless they have found a way to backdoor iOS's permissions structure, the LinkedIn app is absolutely, 100%, not listening to you on your iPhone.
Anything using the mic (on iOS at least) to “listen for keywords” would trigger the “glowing orange dot” indicator.
I was stalked on it by an unhinged bank employee, and even though he's blocked I still see people from his company have viewed my profile on a regular basis.
At the same time, I can't help but think that this practice buys lock in for Apple in some way in the form of potentially new iphone features. And it's just veiled as a pro consumer privacy measure.
Time will tell.
They now present you "content" based on the chances to trigger "engagement". And if you chomp on the bait you do end up spending more time in the app.
Has nothing to do with Apple though. More with profit.
Why would I subject my friends to extra spam/data mining? I never thought this was a good idea.
"the drama"
"dramatic ripple effect"
All because serial viral social app developer startups cannot carry on for the next dozen or what new big social app following several sold and successful out there somewhere, must be out there somewhere being very successful, but endangered now very much, right? Am I insensitive not feeling the doom of humanity here? And wanted to lit celebratory fires in the middle of the Armageddon for the further fortification of privacy?
Contact sharing is dangerous since you can easily reconstruct any individuals social graph (esp big tech), and are unintentionally giving access of your contacts to others.
Same with these apps. “Boo hoo, we can’t root through your contacts anymore, it’s the Appocalypse!” No, jackass, no one ever said it was okay to dig through my contacts, quit acting so entitled.
"The city is helping citizens install locks on their doors to keep burglars out! That's going to really hurt all the new small-time crooks who might just be starting out!"
QED thanks bye
It’s very common for companies that gain some traction, but aren’t on the path to be the next unicorn to get sold off to private equity firms who try to extract the most the value for the least effort. That often involves selling any all data to a data broker.
Personally, I’d treat most apps/companies as if they could be burglars, and only give them access that I need to get value out of the app. I don’t really want to be friends with my landlord or my doctor on the socials anyway.
Like Apps can only do what Apple lets them. If they were doing something people didn't like; it was because Apple let them. Sure, it's good that Apple now is doing something but they're just filling in a hole they dug.
In all honesty, I don’t think many people will select a handful of contacts to share with apps. They’re just gonna share all and that’s it. People don’t have the time nor energy to think and select what contacts to share among hundreds in their address book. It’s such a hassle!
Is there a better way to make that connection without exposing the actual number?
Judge them by what they do, not say
“In iOS 18, however, users who agree to give an app access to their contacts are shown a second message, allowing them to select which contacts to share. Users can opt to share just a handful of contacts by selecting them one by one, rather than forking over their entire address book.”
And it’s about time!!
No bonus points for guessing what type of apps do the latter.
Camera apps?
In other new “Halide rejected from the App Store because it doesn’t explain why the camera takes photos”.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/09/24/halide-rejected-from-the-app-...
If I understand correctly, apps are only given that info to be able to add a custom `Adjust Selection…` button in a convenient place in the app. But this could be handled on a system level instead, where a small unobtrusive pop-up appears, on top of the app without its knowledge, where the user can adjust permissions (kind of like the `Pasted from…` toast when using the clipboard).
It's a bit uglier, but much safer and avoids digging into Settings like you mention. And crummy apps cannot bully you for giving partial access.
Torben University +49 1234567890 [email protected]
who now gets tons of scams and cold calls.
But I guess you were joking a little, by now? Anything real would need to be powered by telcos... not very encouraging from a privacy perspective.
And improving on this devolves into a cat-and-mouse game like iCloud Private Relay, right?
Still would be an additional layer of obscurity for apps that try to coerce users into sharing contacts.
But even then, there must be enough people using the fake contacts, otherwise it's just a more precise fingerprint than not sharing at all.
Thinking about it.. we're not far away from apps requiring you to share your "verified contacts" -_-
Much wining from spam-oriented "social app" operators. World's smallest violin plays.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/contactsui/cnconta...
See Google Photos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26472708
Now we need location granularity permissions: None-Country-City-Locality-Precise, and the app shouldn't know which one it is getting.
• Adding to groups: Sharing an invite link is a good workaround, you need to be group admin though.
For example, you could send hashes of the user's contacts, they could be compared to each other, but not reverse engineered?
Part of the reason I use Graphene is exactly this kind of control.
We saw this with app tracking (just yesterday I saw "we want to keep this app free for you" alert encoruaging me to click "allow" instead of ask app not to track.)
This is already how photos works and its long time that contacts followed suit. Hopefully it leads to people being more aware of the data they are sharing but I guarantee that apps are going to throw up scary screens to encourage you to allow all.
IF this feature is somehow the thing that is blocking you from making a company, your company doesn't deserve to exist. And I apply that to the social media companies that already exist thanks to being able to mine this data before.
Maybe one day: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
But then again - maybe not.
I bet iMessage doesn't ask you if it's allowed to access your contacts, in the same way that Photos doesn't ask you which photos you want Apple to know about. That would be an unacceptable user experience for Apple, but acceptable for 3rd party apps.
This seems to be a constantly overlooked part of the permissions discussion. I'm all in favor of Apple changing the rules on their platform to whatever they like, as long as their own apps have to play by the same rules.
Instead, they use permissions to advantage their apps over the competition.
Similarly, if you use Microsoft Contacts, you assume you see those in Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams, and their devices using their OS.
Similarly for Google's suite, and their devices using their OS.
There are other Contacts apps, such as Clay (from clay.earth) that have other sets of contacts and can sync with still other contacts stores such as, say, LinkedIn. Those aren't visible to Messages without an affirmative action, so Apple is not advantaging itself.
If you're arguing that application suites aren't allowed, any number of users are going to be very annoyed with you.
If you're arguing that nobody can make both hardware and productivity assistant suite combined, you're either saying the PDA doesn't have a right to exist, or, saying that forcing the PDA to be open to other apps on the PDA in turn means the PDA isn't allowed to be an integrated suite now that it's open, and, I guess, saying Microsoft can't make Windows or Surface unless they spin off Office or damage what they make till none of it talks to each other seamlessly?
This entire line of thinking, that nobody's allowed to offer a seamless experience, seems like overregulation of what consumers are allowed to choose and buy.
Most iOS users aren't going to be thinking of "Contacts" as "Apple Contacts". It's just the contacts on their phone. It's their contacts, not Apple's.
I think Apple should absolutely have to use the same permission prompts as 3rd party developers -- because this aligns the incentives to design a great user experience.
Instead, they have no incentive to design these prompts and APIs well -- in fact, a disincentive.
And, still not even if it lets them make a different choice later.
Another implication: All first party apps must be interchangeable. I'm curious -- must third party apps also be?
And then, who decides what lowest common denominator functionality is, and what's OK to offer that others don't?
You've taken that choice away from the market.
I don't see how this prevents an integrated user experience. It's orthogonal.
If the user experience for permission management is well designed, and the APIs are thoughtful, this shouldn't be a problem.
It's a problem in iOS today because the user experience and APIs are an afterthought, and there's a disincentive for making them good.
I am a user and you are wrong.
I absolutely want every app, regardless of vendor, to be sandboxed from each other. Without explicit permission, I don't want Mail or Messages to know that I have a contact card for the peer.