Day: 19 December 2019

As Part of a Pending FTC Settlement, Facebook Agrees Not to Exploit Information Provided for Security Purposes, With Caveats ⇥ reuters.com

In 2018, Kashmir Hill reported for Gizmodo that Facebook was allowing advertisers to target users based on user data provided solely — according to Facebook — for security purposes, such as two-factor authentication phone numbers. Additional reporting by Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch from earlier this year indicated that Facebook indexed two-factor phone numbers in their friend finder tool, without a way to opt out.

Katie Paul, Reuters:

Facebook Inc will no longer feed user phone numbers provided to it for two-factor authentication into its “people you may know” feature, as part of a wide-ranging overhaul of its privacy practices, the company told Reuters.

[…]

It had already stopped allowing those phone numbers to be used for advertising purposes in June, the company said, and is now beginning to extend that separation to friend suggestions.

I believe this is the first explicit acknowledgement that two-factor phone numbers were being used for People You May Know, in addition to the ways in which they were previously exploited.

Sounds good, right? Well, this is Facebook, so its not like this change is available now and applies to all accounts:

Michel Protti, a long-time Facebook executive who took over as chief privacy officer for product this summer and is leading the overhaul, told Reuters the two-factor authentication update was an example of the company’s new privacy model at work.

The change – which is happening in Ecuador, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Libya and Cambodia this week and will be introduced globally early next year – will prevent any phone numbers provided during sign-up for two-factor authentication from being used to make friend suggestions.

Existing users of the tool will not be affected, but can de-link their two-factor authentication numbers from the friend suggestion feature by deleting them and adding them again.

So, unless you reconfigure your two-factor authentication settings — and live in one of the five named countries — the phone number you thought would be used solely for security will keep being usurped for building Facebook’s people finding tools.

If this is an example of Facebook’s radical new privacy-focused business model, well, that seems about right to me.

Movies Should Be Much Shorter ⇥ thecut.com

Katie Heaney, the Cut:

The best web page I’ve found recently, which I will bestow upon you now, is this IMDb guide to “Best Movies Less Than 100 Minutes Running Time.” This will be the list I turn to when I am in the mood to watch something but not in the mood to commit to what feels like half my life to a movie that probably isn’t even that good. Movies are getting longer, but they are not getting better, and I have had enough.

I am fully aware of how much I sound like an old grouch when I write that movies are way too goddamn long. “Avengers: Endgame”, the biggest movie of the year, was over three hours long, and I felt every single minute of it. The second-biggest movie of the year, “The Lion King”, was just a shade under two hours long — which doesn’t sound too bad, until you compare it to the original, and realize that the extra thirty minutes in the terrible new one added nothing.

It’s not just movies, either: many albums are also way too long, despite the inherent flexibility of music streaming. Drake is notorious for padding the run time of his records. He has released a new full-length solo album every year for the past four years; the shortest one is one hour and thirteen minutes long, and it’s just a collection of off-cuts and outtakes.

Catalyst and Cohesion ⇥ wormsandviruses.com

Jack Wellborn:

[…] Developers using first party tools from Apple shouldn’t have to swim upstream to build cohesive Mac versions of their apps. I am not saying that the existence of any incongruous Catalyst ports is worrisome — incongruous ports are inevitable and Catalyst is an opportunity to make them better — what’s worrisome is that incongruity seems to be the default with Catalyst.

Look no further than Apple’s own Catalyst ports. Developers have enjoyed a variety of good first party examples on both Mac OS and iOS. Mail, TextEdit, Preview, Notes serve as examples of what good cohesive apps on those platforms should look like. Outside of maybe the Podcasts app, Apple made Catalyst apps feel like ports.

Wellborn’s use of the word “cohesive” is inspired and speaks to the root of my worries about Catalyst. Great MacOS apps are often not entirely consistent, but they are cohesive — apps with unique user interfaces, like Coda and Tweetbot, feel very Mac-like, even though both are from third-party developers and neither one looks especially like Mail or Preview.

It worries me that some of Apple’s own MacOS apps lack cohesion; and, though Catalyst is the purest expression of this concern, it is not solely at fault. The redesigned Mac App Store that debuted in Mojave certainly looks like a Mac app, but it feels and functions like a crappy port from some distant platform. It launches by zooming in from the desktop; editorial collections open with an absurd sliding animation and cover the entire app like a sheet; it contains a truly bizarre combination of large click targets and tiny buttons. And none of this can be blamed on a bad Catalyst port, because the Mac App Store is not a Catalyst app, as far as I can tell.

It is frustrating to see Apple release a mediocre porting utility like Catalyst, but it is truly concerning that some of their newer Mac apps feel this incongruous. It would be one thing if it were a third-party developer, but these are first-party apps. As much as I am excited by the prospects of SwiftUI, I have to wonder whether this current stage of cross-platform-influenced Mac development is a distraction, or portends the lazy Mac experience of the future.

Update: Now that my MacBook Air is running MacOS Catalina, I see that the Mac App Store is improved compared to Mojave. It no longer features the comical zoom animation at launch, and the escape key can now be used to dismiss editorial collections. But it still doesn’t feel like a Mac app. Also, the JetEngineMac framework has been moved from within the Mac App Store app package to /System/Library/Private Frameworks, along with a new JetUI framework.