The most frustrating for me is social media apps constantly asking you to share your contacts with them. They get a curated database of every name, number, email address, street address, and photo from (I would guess) most users, and that data isn't even yours to deny access to.
Sure, it's all publicly available info, but I don't want services I haven't signed up for having my info without my consent. I don't like that my friends and family can just give them access to all of that data without me being involved in any way.
I share your frustration. However, in my case, that kind of information is not on any publicly accessible database. Most friends, family and colleagues wouldn’t even know my address – some might know how to get to me as (house with a yellow door in the middle of the second street to the left, after the church …).
Still, it annoys me that most people probably have my personal email address, phone number and real name tied together as a contact and provide this information to at least one online platform. Back when I used to use Google and Android, I would try to preserve my contacts’ privacy by storing their names using some mixture of first name, nicknames, initial for surname and context, e.g., “Alan F”, “Fid”¹, “Alan (football)“, “John (work)“. I’d also keep their number and email address as separate contacts — though that might only have worked in the early to mid 2000s. At some point, Google started getting too clever at determining which contacts could be “merged”.
On the other hand, apps like WhatsApp won’t work at all without access to the phone user’s contacts list, so asking for permission is a mere formality and Meta gets your information regardless.
> On the other hand, apps like WhatsApp won’t work at all without access to the phone user’s contacts list,
I don't think that's true. Users could be allowed to enter addresses individuality or ideally, when apps ask for permissions to a person's contacts phones could allow users to select what the app can and cannot see (only certain contacts, or phone numbers but not email addresses, etc)
There are ways phones and apps could handle contact data while preserving privacy, but nobody is interested in helping people keep their data private. Phones are designed to leak your data like a sieve and apps are designed to collect every scrap of data they can get their hands on.
I was speaking about how WhatsApp currently works. Not how WhatsApp could potentially work (and the functionality you suggest would almost certainly never be implemented unless Meta were compelled by law to do so).
completely unrelated to what’s being discussed. If I don’t want my fairly anonymous HN posts to be scraped I can avoid posting on HN.
I cannot avoid every contact I have not using these services, unless I have no contacts. If whatever point you’re making is “who cares you can’t avoid it anyway,” that’s not only intellectually very lazy, it’s untrue - Lots of countries have regulated their way around these issues. The fact that one of the biggest producers of tech in the world (US) has this space fairly unregulated is not some excuse to capitulate to things that are fairly easy to regulate sensibly, if there is political will and knowledge. With uninformed takes like the parent I’m replying to still floating around out there, I guess it really is inevitable and unavoidable.
Even if you stop using Gmail, chances are that the other party is using Gmail. (Today even e-mail addresses with non-Gmail domains are often using Gmail behind their custom domain.) So, your emails go to train AI for Google even if you deliberately stopped using their service.
You're not wrong, but it certainly doesn't hurt to to use a different email service. I use Protonmail as my main email account, and I'm sure the HN crowd knows that there many other good email services available these days. If you think the general population should change their behavior, then it has to start somewhere, y'know?
This actually differs from one jurisdiction to another, that is, some jurisdictions do not permit publication of correspondence without the consent of the sender. Use of your email for AI training therefore may therefore be open to legal challenge. You know how legal challenges start? By someone feeling that there is a problem.
In any event, as the other poster mentioned, your original post claimed “You can…” and now you are moving to “You can’t” out of an apparent relish for being contrarian. This is not good-faith discussion on your part.
The article says "Your Gmail and Instagram are training AI.", emphasis on the "your". Of course I can't do anything about someone else distributing data I gave them.
>It’s your data.
>As soon as you decide to upload it somewhere else, it's not.
That may be how everyone is treating it but that isn’t the only or even the obvious way for it to be. Mailing something doesn’t give the mailing service a right to open and scan the contents of your letter, even if it could do so without damaging anything. Parking your car with a valet service does not grant the service the right to drive your car to make deliveries while you’re not using it. Sending photo film to be developed doesn’t give the developing service a right to make their own copies of it. And so on.
It’s not unreasonable for a user to think of their emailing something as just granting the mail service the minimal privileges necessary to transmit and deliver the message to the explicitly intended recipient.
You can stop using those services.
>It’s your data.
As soon as you decide to upload it somewhere else, it's not.