
Meitu, a Viral Anime Makeover App, Has Major Privacy Red Flags - aaron695
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/meitu-viral-anime-makeover-app-major-privacy-red-flags/
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niftich
This is article lies at the holy trinity of clickbait-(and-switch), alarmist
bullshit, and a potential for actual investigative journalism being passed up.

Meitu does request a puzzling array of permissions [1], most of which are
clearly not necessary for what is a face filter camera app, but mainstream
apps (despite, as it says in the article, being backed by "well-known company
names which we have already trusted our data with") do the exact same. I fail
to see why it's implicitly okay for Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and half a
dozen other apps to set cookies, run embedded browsers, harvest location and
wifi info, draw over apps, request running apps, and use all of it to serve
more targeted ads, while we should be wary of a foreign company doing the
same.

Though the concern is not unwarranted, their tonedeaf delivery make the whole
thing come off as FUD -- especially once they break out wisdom, and say,
quote:

 _" But free apps merit skepticism. After all, they're generating revenue
somehow. If you can't figure out the business model, the app could well be
collecting and selling some of your personal information to advertising
services looking to dole out more and more effective ads."_

There was a potential for a very interesting tidbit where they mentioned that
Meitu is supposedly in the Sand Hill program, some kind of project by Google
Play for apps that may go most viral, but since they published the story
without waiting for a response from Google, right now it's just a teaser with
no substantive info.

In either case, apps like this just prove over and over again that mobile
permissions (most acutely on Android) are still user-hostile, are designed
with unhelpful granularity in ways that lump permissions of different utility
and severity into one approval category, and are not an effective tool for
users to control their data disclosure while allowing app utility.

[1]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mt.mtxx.mt...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mt.mtxx.mtxx&hl=en)

