Girl sees he face on billboards after downloading a "free" app!

[Beamin]

How great is it that we have all these apps on our phones that help us get where we are going, compare prices on things instantly from reading the bar code, or finding restaurants or other things as we drive by them? Or even helping you pass the time in the waiting room? Best part is they are all free if you had to pay money for them it would cost a fortunae with monthly subscription fees.

Or is it free? What exactly are you agreeing to when you click accept? Are you going to end up in the middle of human centipede because you didn't have a layer present when iTunes changes their terms for the 24th time this month like Kyle on south park did (that's a real movie they were spoofing) ?

I knew a girl who one day got a check in the mail for several hundred dollars for being the victim of a class action lawsuit that she didn't even know about. It turns out she downloaded an app on her cell phone that like almost all apps give the company access to your: contacts, text massages, picture messages and pictures, and GPS location email and browser history and cookies. She unknowingly gave some nameless corporation her entire life. In the time it tookyouto read this hundreds of people have.

This company would take peoples pictures copywrite them and sell them as stock photos. She took a picture of herself and two of her friends. This picture and all her other pictures was downloaded and sold to a marketing company. The company then took the pictures made it into an add and put it on bill boards all across the country. She had no idea that thousands of people were looking at her and her friends every day they drove by. She obviously wasn't paid or made aware of this. After she got the check she called up the law firm to make sure it wasn't some sort of scam. They told her the billboards were supposed to be taken down but the company had some ridiculously long time to do it and she drove out to see one. The part that I didn't understand as she wasn't that upset and said it was just a picture of her goofing around and didn't really care. Maybe the real threat is peoples apathy to this. When I see libertarian types trying to defend this they never agree to let me look at their phone and copy all the pictures in it along with telling me where they live, work, kids go to school, and everything else you could gain by following someone around 24/7.

This is totally unacceptable and you should have the option of choosing this. I understand that google maps traffic info wouldn't work with out GPS data but really I don't want everyone to know everything about me. The internet was great at first because you were totally anonymous. Now its the biggest invasion of privacy when coupled with behavioral algorithms. Just a matter of time when this sets a precedent in some court case to convict someone of a crime or terrorism. Next time you send a dick pic think of who else you want to see that? Maybe if we raise enough awareness of the subject the number of dick pics from random strangers in my inbox will go down! #dickpicawareness

[capt bullshot]

You've always got the choice to not use a device that does all that stuff.
Apart from not knowing what use a smartphone would have for me, this is the second reason I don't use one.

But yes, you're right, many people just don't care about it, or don't realize what happens in their devices. And if one tries to explain, they often just shrug their shoulders and continue to not care about that. For others the ostensible gain in say "Payback Points" or "Funky App that promises to make up my kitchen" masks out any doubt.

[tooki]

[snip]
This company would take peoples pictures copywrite them and sell them as stock photos. She took a picture of herself and two of her friends. This picture and all her other pictures was downloaded and sold to a marketing company.  […]

Yikes, that's a terrible thing to happen! (This is why iOS has granular permissions, demanding express user consent for each individual type of access, not just all-or-nothing.)

Anyway, just as an aside, copyright is not something you can apply for as such. Copyright automatically exists and is assigned to the creator of the work; registering a copyright is only something you do to make it easier to prove who owns it. (Copyright can be sold or otherwise reassigned, and in employment, copyright generally automatically belongs to the employer, not employee, though this does vary in some situations.) So this means that the girl already owned copyright to the pictures, and if she were to sue for copyright infringement, she would likely win. (It's unlikely that a transfer-of-copyright or free licensing clause in a EULA would stand up in court for content that was uploaded without the user actually intending to upload them. So such a clause might stand up in, say, a restaurant rating app where you upload pix, but not in a weather app or solitaire game.)

[NiHaoMike]

Please name the company so everyone can flood their contact numbers and emails with complaints about their unethical behavior. Also, we should encourage more development of open source apps since it's harder to hide that sort of trick in those. And no requirement for cloud services or at least a way to run your own server.

[Red Squirrel]

You've always got the choice to not use a device that does all that stuff.
Apart from not knowing what use a smartphone would have for me, this is the second reason I don't use one.

The issue with this argument is that some devices/software you almost MUSt have.  If you are the only one in your circle of friends without a smart phone, or without a computer, or without a car or without another common thing you'll be the odd person out.   Also what if you simply WANT to have that device.  It should be your right to have it, without all the fine print that comes with it.   There needs to be better laws about the stuff companies can put in the license agreement.  They should not be allowed to force stuff on you just because you hit "yes".  If that stuff is not required for the device to operate then it should not be forced and should be opt in.

Same with all these stupid apps that require an account.  I hate that crap, there is zero reason for it as far as the user is concerned.

[Mr. Scram]

Can we get a link to this case? Because it will inevitably have had a lot of press and it's too good a story to just discuss based on hearsay.

[janoc]

[snip]
This company would take peoples pictures copywrite them and sell them as stock photos. She took a picture of herself and two of her friends. This picture and all her other pictures was downloaded and sold to a marketing company.  […]

Yikes, that's a terrible thing to happen! (This is why iOS has granular permissions, demanding express user consent for each individual type of access, not just all-or-nothing.)
...

iOS permissions would do squat about this, please don't perpetuate this nonsense. Even iOS doesn't have a "don't sell my photos as stock photos" permission setting. Only camera access and some control of filesystem access - exactly the same as Android does these days (yes I have done app development for both).

This kind of crap is what you will typically find in the app's EULA (license) or privacy policy - which nobody reads and some applications don't even display it, only putting it somewhere in a dark corner of the app or their website.

AKA:

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

E.g. Instagram has tried to pull this off a few years ago when they have sneaked a bit of legalese into their EULA/Terms of Service that would have let them to sell your images. They have very quickly backed down when the inevitable PR shitstorm started.


Apropos, Beamin, wasn't this the original story instead?

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/01/africa/stock-image-face-advert/index.html

It went through the press worldwide a few weeks ago. Except it wasn't about a smartphone app stealing photos but someone who got tricked into doing an actual photoshoot and didn't read the contract/release they have signed there.

I suspect that what you heard has actually started as the story above and then it "morphed" into "smartphone app stealing pictures for an unsavory company" thing somewhere on Facebook ...

IMO, using people's smartphone pictures and selling them as stock photos is a rather strange idea - legal and ethical issues of that aside, it would be an incredibly inefficient and wasteful way of getting images. You would need an army of people to pour through the loads of selfies, pictures of food, pets, naked penises and what not, all in miserable quality, poor lighting and framing to find maybe one semi-usable image that someone could actually buy. Hiring a photographer and a few models would be both more effective and cheaper.

And even then the pictures would have potential legal issues around copyright and personal rights (you can't just sign a copyright away or an actor's release by clicking "accept" button when the app asks for file access permissions - that is unlikely to fly in courts but IANAL).

[Fred27]

This post reminds me of those daft chain emails you used to get from people who had only just discovered the internet.

[bd139]

This actually happened to my father via an analogue medium. He got his photos developed at the local processing place. Next thing he knows one was on their marketing material. He phoned them and told them and they told him to go away. He did consider suing them but decided the best approach was to just throw a brick through their window from his motorcycle. Unfortunately he was stopped on the way by the police who were very interested in the brick. Thus he lost and had his brick confiscated too.

Every time information changes hands it risks being misused. This isn’t specific to technology.

 A lot of current financial sector legislation at least here in the UK is about meticulous control. If this happened in the EU, GDPR would kick in and the vendor would be up shit creek.

[tooki]

[snip]
This company would take peoples pictures copywrite them and sell them as stock photos. She took a picture of herself and two of her friends. This picture and all her other pictures was downloaded and sold to a marketing company.  […]

Yikes, that's a terrible thing to happen! (This is why iOS has granular permissions, demanding express user consent for each individual type of access, not just all-or-nothing.)
...

iOS permissions would do squat about this, please don't perpetuate this nonsense. Even iOS doesn't have a "don't sell my photos as stock photos" permission setting. Only camera access and some control of filesystem access - exactly the same as Android does these days (yes I have done app development for both).

It's not at all "nonsense". You missed the point: that in iOS (and in later versions of Android, I think?) an app must request permission for each type of thing (contacts, photos, notifications, etc.), whereas in earlier versions of Android, it was all-or-nothing. So if you download an app — say, a calendar — and it asks for access to your calendar, address book, notifications, photos, camera, and microphone, on iOS, you'd get a separate request for each, and you'd wonder "uhhh, why does this calendar need my photos and mike?". In contrast, in early Android, if you wanted to accept the calendar's notifications, but deny it photo access, a) you couldn't, and b) you might not even notice that it was asking for access to photos.

Did you notice my comment above somewhere about how the "all your content are belong to us" clauses in EULAs would almost certainly be unenforceable in court for material that the app collected surreptitiously and with no plausible need (for the app's actual purpose)? That's why if the EULA of a photo sharing site might be able to get away with auto-licensing your photos, but an equivalent clause in the EULA for a game wouldn't.

[Halcyon]

[snip]
This company would take peoples pictures copywrite them and sell them as stock photos. She took a picture of herself and two of her friends. This picture and all her other pictures was downloaded and sold to a marketing company.  […]

Yikes, that's a terrible thing to happen! (This is why iOS has granular permissions, demanding express user consent for each individual type of access, not just all-or-nothing.)
...

iOS permissions would do squat about this, please don't perpetuate this nonsense. Even iOS doesn't have a "don't sell my photos as stock photos" permission setting. Only camera access and some control of filesystem access - exactly the same as Android does these days (yes I have done app development for both).

Not only this but the Android permissions are actually more granular than iOS. Apart from the standard "camera, contact, telephone" permissions, you can go even further to really fine-tune what applications can and can't do. It also gives you a much more detailed list of permissions that are actually meaningful, such as receive data from internet, control vibration, access approximate (network-based) location, install shortcuts etc...

[Brumby]

Careful ... the Apple fan-boys will throw a brick at you from their Vespa...

[ebastler]

Apropos, Beamin, wasn't this the original story instead?
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/01/africa/stock-image-face-advert/index.html

It went through the press worldwide a few weeks ago. Except it wasn't about a smartphone app stealing photos but someone who got tricked into doing an actual photoshoot and didn't read the contract/release they have signed there.

Thanks janoc. That's how these urban legends evolve...
Beamin -- at least tell it like it's supposed to be told, and say that "a good fried of my colleague's sister" experienced this. 

[BradC]

Best part is they are all free

Not my quote, but one I believe in strongly : "If you are not paying for the product, you are the product."

[TERRA Operative]

This is a big reason I use the 'NetGuard' firewall app on my phone.
I block everything from any network access except the few things I actually use, and even then many things I only unblock only while I use them (Google Play for example), then they are blocked again once I am finished.

I also used this guide to rip out all the bloat that comes with the phone:
https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatware-without-root-access/

[EEVblog]

This is not the forum for off-topic posts like these.
Locked.