this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Privacy

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Some random website knows which school i go to, this is the second time i have received this message

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[–] otter@lemmy.ca 145 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (20 children)

Sounds like a really spammy and annoying way to promote an app. I assume someone else who has your phone number signed up on their app and gave access to all their contacts. Then the app sends out spam texts to get you to sign up.

Depending on where you are located, you might be able to report it. Otherwise just drop them a bad review, or name and shame them here

edit, I assume it's this: https://slickapp.co/

[–] fastandcurious@lemmy.world 46 points 11 months ago (7 children)

The thing is there should be a big fucking warning screen when apps ask for contact permissions saying ‘You are sharing OVERLY sensitive and potentially DANGEROUS data’ and then have the screen wait until 15 sec before they can press OK

But they are reserved for when i am using an adblocker

[–] ultratiem@lemmy.ca 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

That’s just a fundamental problem with security. You can vault up your home but give your idiot brother in law a key and find the back door wide open, him drunk on the kitchen floor.

Prompts don’t work and aren’t really the right way to go because they are annoying and pretty cryptic as apps often assign a myriad of features to a single permission. Everyone’s just going to hit OK.

It’s a difficult issue to solve because there are so many edge cases. And fundamentally you can’t really control what others do with your number.

Honestly. I wish we started talking about doing away with phone numbers altogether. I feel tech is there. And it’s honestly such a massive fingerprint. I’ve had mine for 20 years ffs.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah. There's literally nothing you can put on a prompt that will truly work. It's still a good idea to prompt cause it will reduce how many people approve the prompt, but there is a significant number of people who don't read prompts at all and just insta-confirm.

At best, I think you could design it so there's no way for an app to request certain permissions themselves. They'd have to be opted in from the system settings and apps could only tell you how to do it. But that's a usability nightmare that is quite frustrating for legitimate usages. There's already some super sensitive permissions that do this. I think the ability to install apps, ability to display over other apps, and password managers for android.

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