In recent days, T-Mobile customers stumbled upon an unannounced setting in the T-Mobile T-Life app that raised some eyebrows and has created a bit of a freakout. A new setting called “Screen recording tool” was found on select devices and was enabled with a description that doesn’t... #TMobile
Yup. Worked briefly for a company that would “snapshot” the browser view quite often, enough where if an issue arose we could somewhat replay the user’s interactions to try and repro the issue.
Then why the rhetorical question for something that I never stated?
Now that we’re past that, I’m not sure if I think it’s okay, but I at least recognize that it’s normalized within society. And has been for like 70+ years now. The problem happens with how the data is used, and particularly abused.
If you walk into my store, you expect that I am monitoring you. You expect that you are on camera and that your shopping patterns, like all foot traffic, are probably being analyzed and aggregated. What you buy is tracked, at least in aggregate, by default really, that’s just volume tracking and prediction.
Suffice to say that broad customer behavior analysis has been a thing for a couple generations now, at least.
When you go to a website, why would you think that it is not keeping track of where you go and what you click on in the same manner?
Now that I’ve stated that I do want to say that the real problems that we experience come in with how this data is misused out of what it’s scope should be. And that we should have strong regulatory agencies forcing compliance of how this data is used and enforcing the right to privacy for people that want it removed.
Definitely not OK. But it exists and I don’t think people realize it goes beyond tracking clicks to taking actual screenshots that can be stitched together practically as a video. It sucks.
It’s only recording screens within the app. This sounds like an analytics tools. Any webpage can do this, common usage is click tracking.
Yup. Worked briefly for a company that would “snapshot” the browser view quite often, enough where if an issue arose we could somewhat replay the user’s interactions to try and repro the issue.
Pretty much any error tracking analytic software worth it’s salt does that these days!
… And that makes it okay, somehow?
Did I say that it did?
No?
Then why the rhetorical question for something that I never stated?
Now that we’re past that, I’m not sure if I think it’s okay, but I at least recognize that it’s normalized within society. And has been for like 70+ years now. The problem happens with how the data is used, and particularly abused.
If you walk into my store, you expect that I am monitoring you. You expect that you are on camera and that your shopping patterns, like all foot traffic, are probably being analyzed and aggregated. What you buy is tracked, at least in aggregate, by default really, that’s just volume tracking and prediction.
Suffice to say that broad customer behavior analysis has been a thing for a couple generations now, at least.
When you go to a website, why would you think that it is not keeping track of where you go and what you click on in the same manner?
Now that I’ve stated that I do want to say that the real problems that we experience come in with how this data is misused out of what it’s scope should be. And that we should have strong regulatory agencies forcing compliance of how this data is used and enforcing the right to privacy for people that want it removed.
Definitely not OK. But it exists and I don’t think people realize it goes beyond tracking clicks to taking actual screenshots that can be stitched together practically as a video. It sucks.