Give away your data

Ring’s app caught spying on users, sharing data with third-parties

Amazon’s Ring for Android app is loaded with third-party trackers harvesting a “plethora” of customer data, a new investigation claims —and an Amazon engineer for the product wants it completely shut down.

Whoever that brave person is, is not long for that job, Amazon do not like their people talking like that.

A few of my neighbours have Ring, I don’t like this, I would never touch them, not after they were bought by Amazon. I did contract work for Amazon once, on their Prime Video player, I have boycotted them ever since, they are deeply toxic.

But it goes deeper than one company adding analytics tool to their app.

I worked recently on an iOS app that is all about the most personal information a person has, to help them make sense of themselves, it seemed like a worthwhile project.

Bit by bit, always with a seemingly sensible business purpose, analytics service API libraries were added to the app.

FaceBook, Crashlytics, MixPanel, the list goes on, each one offering some internally definable set of user-intelligence data that somehow made it a business usecase no-brainer to add.

Every time this happened, I was the weirdo who asked, why are you doing this? Do you have any idea what else this API is doing in this vast library?

Every time I was laughed down, hey he’s the old guy, he does not get it in this digital age ROFL 🤣.

The free surveillance APIs offer businesses who make apps (in the race to the bottom marketplace) some incentive, fiscal (I never personally saw that) or enticingly analytical, in what seems like an innocent exchange, for what really is the mother-lode of sellable personal information.

It is not evil intentions on behalf of businesses that include these APIs, it is more like laziness.