I left dropbox when they changed the full page upsell to "dropbox business" so that I couldn't easily figure out how to skip it and get on with my work.

I had a paid pro account at the time.

I actually had a conversation with a product manager; I checked the yes you can contact me when I cancelled my account. They simply refused to admit that an upsell was a advertisement and that disrupting my workflow on my paid, professional account for an ad was wrong.

The other interesting thing about that conversation, they could not understand how a sole proprietor would see no benefit from collaboration tools and kept making up bizarre scenarios where I could use them.

I actually asked them if they were a product manager or a salesperson at one point.

To Dropbox's credit, that product manager didn't try to retain me, they were genuinely trying to figure out why I had quit; they just couldn't grok the reason.

Same with the ads for Amazon videos on Amazon Prime. They are ads and I don't want ads. But they don't see it that way (don't get me started on the forced watching of texts on Blue Rays).

Ads on Amazon Prime are infuriating. And I can't help think how annoying it must be for people with disabilities.

My other bugbear are the auto playing videos on Netflix and the use of massive spoilers in episode thumbnails.

As a single consumer in a vast ocean I don't think my opinions will ever be listened to. Right now it's worth putting up with this crap as the benefits outweigh the cost but if it gets any worse I'll be unsubscribing.

This is a great example of why I still prefer torrenting films and TV shows as opposed to using my wife’s Netflix sub: the pirated media is better!

Netflix and Hulu and competing with easier to use and more flexible pirated media, whether they like it or not. The consistency and flexibility of the VLC interface (or whatever media player you choose) is vastly better than whatever features a Netflix PM is trying to push to juice their metrics.

(I won’t even get into unskippable screens on Blu-Ray discs which are removed on the pirate version.)

Yeah, piracy is almost always the better service. How the hell can a bunch of enthusiasts come up with a better service than multi-billion dollar companies? They seriously need to stop and rethink their industry. When I use my Netflix I get a horribly compressed "high definition" picture, annoying autoplaying ads for shows I don't care about and a constantly decreasing amount of content. Piracy offers the opposite of all that: high quality encodes, no bullshit ads anywhere and complete collections of everything.

First, I dispute that piracy is really better. Amazon and netflix generally work easier than piracy. My, um friend, has radarr + usenet + plex, and its work pretty well 80%. But subtitles are often a problem. Unpacking/par checking sometimes takes forever. Sometimes the decoder in plex doesn't really work. Sometimes the movie has been DMCA'd off the use net servers. Private trackers involve sucking up to to 15 year old polish kids who run their service like the Stazi.

You can usually find everything you want, but sometimes it requires some time.

I don't have a large 4k tv, so maybe I'm not appreciating how bad the streaming movies look.

But Netflix, Amazon, itunes, Vudo, etc. are all way easier services to use.

Second, they are targeting the masses, who probably like a 30 second preview for another show and don't care how 4k is encoded. In my experience, about 50% of people with high def TV's didn't even set up high def cable packages.

The reason piracy is perceived to be better is agency. With Netflix/whatever, you have zero agency if something you want isn't there, other than signing up for some other streaming service.

Even if it's hard to find something on public trackers with the right dubs/subtitles, it's rarely impossible for popular content. And if the subtitles are bad, you can, for example, download a different lower quality rip and pull the subtitles off that. The point is, in this system the user has control over the data they are consuming. This is infinitely preferable to some people than the chains of DRM.

Agreed. I use and love Plex (subtitles are less of an issue since they added the ability to automatically find subtitles for shows/movies), but people who say the experience is better are forgetting the amount of time and effort you need to find a reliable torrent site, manage the torrents, and set up the plex server.

It's not a huge amount of work by any means, but for many people it's probably insurmountable. Let alone when you compare it to the work involved to use a streaming service:

1. Sign up 2. Enter CC info 3. Done

Ease of use depends on your computer literacy, I think. For me it involves pasting the IMDB ID into a fairly popular public torrent site (eg. tt0095560) and feed the magnet link to Transmission running on my storage server. When it's done, it gets picked up by LibreELEC and is ready to watch. Could my mother use this? No. But you don't need a computer science degree to do this either.

When Netflix launched in Denmark, I immedately jumped on it. It used to have endless amounts of great content, and was way more convenient than piracy. Now it's just filled with trash, and I can never find what I want to watch. Piracy has again become more convenient.

Exactly. 5 weeks ago I needed CBS All Access to watch an NFL game and I figured I'd watch ST Discovery and the Stand too. I had access in 3 clicks on Roku in the Amazon prime channel. I can cancel at anytime.

My wife wanted to watch the Borne Identity and my um friend had figure out why Radarr blacklisted a bunch of releases then wait for it to download and un-par (which took 5x longer than the download). I came back into the living room 15 minutes later and found my wife just watching it with commercials on Peacock.

During a break I convinced her to switch to plex since it didn't have commercials. But then we had to pause the movie and fumble with subtitles for the scenes in the swiss bank. First downloaded set didn't match the timestamps. Second did, but it was like 5 minutes. "Why couldn't you just let me watch in on NBC HONEY?"

When I said piracy was the better service, what I meant is it offered much higher quality, not that it was easier to use. Piracy actually takes a ton of work. Of course paying for a streaming subscription is the easiest solution: people just pay and enjoy what it offers. The problem is the fact they consistently offer the lowest quality product.

1. Horrible video compression to save bandwidth

When they offer users high definition content, they're actually talking about the resolution of the image. The quality and detail of the image will almost always be much worse if compared to another source such as Blu-Rays. Netflix somehow manages to add compression artifacts to nearly 100% black frames. Scenes with a lot of movement are actually painful to watch.

Compare that to the obssessive attention to detail you can often find in piracy communities and the winner is obvious.

2. Censorship

These services aren't afraid to cut content in order to broaden their audiences. They may even be required to do it by law. Pirates obviously don't have these problems.

3. Annoying copyright issues nobody cares about

Netflix once had Terminator 1 and 3 but not 2, as well as Spider Man 1 and 3 but not 2. Was the license for these movies too expensive for them? Who knows? Who cares?

Want to watch a classic film? An influential film? Chances are it's not on Netflix. Where is it then? Who knows... Maybe not actually available at all anywhere no matter where you look.

Piracy just ignores these issues. As a result it gives you access to almost everything humanity has ever created.

4. DRM

Netflix won't give you access to their precious 4k+ streams if it feels your device isn't locked down enough. Disney is even more aggressive with these measures. Even on my perfectly locked down PS4 system it won't let me download content ahead of time. Apparently they think network connections are reliable.

Pirates simply don't have these problems.

5. Superior technology

Netflix's video player is garbage compared to mpv. The video players of every other streaming service manage to be even worse. It's not just the basic-ness of it either: sometimes it stutters and falls out of sync with the audio, sometimes it screws up the rendering of subtitles...

The one area where streaming service technology wins is their ability to offer alternate audio streams.

Another point, cloud service is extremely unstable. The movie/anime/feature/etc would disappear somedays without any reason and no way to rebase.

For piracy, one just needs to backup. And, this is controlled by user not whatever COMPANY/POLICY.

There's a big range between generic streaming and setting up all those usenet (which is probably the most complicated of them all).

Something like https://put.io/ is far easier while still providing all the control you need over files and usually makes them available instantly.

Oh yes. Especially with the chill institute.

They become multi billion companies by having different incentives (making profit) than the enthusiasts.

I think all creators should have a pirates donations box so pirated content doesn’t impact the creators that much.

Does watching hq torrents of content I have legal access to count? :)

My 960 GPU in the htpc doesn't quite have the bit depth that Netflix wants, therefore it disables 4k entirely. Bought the GPU at the time as it was the first with hardware HECV, has zero issues playing back a 4k encoding by someone else..

Wait, can you not play SDR 4K on Netflix?

What happens if you play the first season of Stranger Things, which was produced in 4K but not in HDR?

SDR? Sure. But unless something has changed recently, 4K Netflix on PC requires a particular flavor of Windows DRM that is only supported by NVIDIA GPUs starting with Pascal and Intel integrated graphics starting with Kaby Lake‡.

On a more technical related note, I'd imagine 4K SDR variants of all Netflix HDR productions are generated on the back-end as an output of the same post-production process used to produce SDR prints at lower resolutions for reasons of both creative control an delivery efficiency; HEVC is just a compression algorithm, after all, and mostly orthogonal to matters of colorspace conversion and tone mapping.

See, e.g.,

https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...

and observe that the example Dolby Vision workflow yields three distinct masters,

1. Dolby Vision (HDR + SDR tone mapping metadata)

2. SDR (generated automatically from the Dolby Vision source)

3. DCI-P3 (for potential theatrical exhibition)

I therefore assume the requirements for 4K SDR playback of SDR and HDR titles are identical.

‡ If and only if said Kaby Lake iGPU is connected to a video output.

I mention this because I can only watch 4K Netflix on my Hades Canyon NUC with the help of a Pascal eGPU, because, while the Kaby Lake iGPU is present and fully functional, all video outputs connect to the NUC's discrete AMD Polaris GPU, which Netflix doesn't support.

DRM sucks.

Excellent reply, thanks very much. My HTPC is ageing, but I like to push the life of my computers to the most. So needing an even better GPU or CPU when it should have been able to downgrade a tad is annoying.

Nothing is really stopping you from paying for the content and pirating it to get the quality you want.

But lets be honest, essentially all pirates just want the content for free.

Meh? A couple years back, I bought myself a box set of a season of Doctor Who. A taxpayer-funded series. It refused to play on any of my devices, because they were not to the DRM's liking. Torrenting took a fraction of the time I spent trying to debug why I can't watch the content I have actually paid for.

I'd like to bypass the whole system (the middleman army) and give a donation directly to the creator if possible and I do sometimes when I'm awestruck with something. But that is not always possible and rare to matter in the grand scheme of things.

That doesn't really make sense in the context of movies and tv shows. The creators are thousands of people.

> constantly decreasing amount of content

Frankly, this matters less and less if 98% of your offering is "Netflix originals" pulp. After 10 minutes of watching I have a feeling they should pay me for watching this.

In anyone asked me, I'd prefer quality over perceived quantity. Quality needs time, thought, talent.

If VLC had a slightly prettier interface, a better logo, and more intuitive queueing/playlists, it would be perfect

Okay, I’m sure the logo has meaning to the devs, so they don’t mind it looking like an error message. That’s fair. They aren’t Instagram, they’re not going for the lowest common denominator. And, okay, the UI works, so why fuck with it?

But why doesn’t it play the next video in a directory when you’ve finished the first? Why is the playlist option so hard to find and oddly implemented? Why can’t they update the UI to look like it was at least made for win7?

This sounds like a major gripe, but really it’s not. Everything else is amazing in that app, it’s one of the best, most complete user experiences around, especially for a free app, but it just seems like it has some really obvious problems with fairly minor fixes

Just drag an entire folder or multiple files into VLC and it'll play everything in order automatically.

I use MPV which has a much more minimal UI and better performance: https://mpv.io/

Really? Nowadays ive found it hard to get good 4k hdr downloads of things with seeders. Piracy seems to top out at 1080p at least it bittorrent land

A lot of it is probably caused by demographics - torrents are pretty popular in countries where 4k is not the norm and may not be accessible.

FWIW I have 20/10 vision (twice as sharp as "perfect normal") and have never seen the appeal of retina screens or 4k.

edit: Also the file sizes are vastly larger for 4k for an incremental benefit.

You should see a 1080p vs 4k HDR video of the same thing on an OLED and see the difference. I see the difference all the time. The mandolorian is a good one for that.

I don't have a 4k screen currently but it looks like most TVs support 4k nowadays, so if my TV ever dies, I'll be sure to try this. Thanks for the viewpoint.

Depends on where you're downloading. 4K isn't as prevalent but it's usually out there.

Agreed. Also there are in-between services like Put.IO that provide better UX while handling most of the technical bits: https://put.io/

Ads on Prime on kids content is especially frustrating.

My biggest goal with kids is to help them with their focus and limit exposure to "infinity pools" of content. It's not that I have a problem with the content of the ads, it's that they train kids' brains to want to switch quickly between content the moment a show has a lull.

It creates that FOMO that they might not be watching the most exciting show right now because the ad always makes the other show look way better.

Youtube is of course the epitome of this issue, although disabling the mini-player on kids content helps a little.

I do have a problem with the content of the ads on kids videos - I've seen violence in some of them

> My other bugbear are the auto playing videos on Netflix and the use of massive spoilers in episode thumbnails.

You can actually turn off "Autoplay previews" now. You have to log into your account from a web browser, and then look at the Playback settings for the profile you want to change.

What you can’t turn off is the bit where they drop you into another trailer when you’ve just finished watching a series after months of investment. A little time to digest would be real nice.

Every single video app I have on my AppleTV: Netflix, Amazon, Criterion, even Apple’s own TV app, shrinks whatever you are watching down to a thumbnail just before the movie or show ends.

I fucking hate it. Yes, I’m one of those weirdos who sits through to the end when the copyright rolls past and gets pissed off when the lights come on at a theater during the credits.

It is incredibly disrespectful to the film.

This is one of those “good taste” things that I feel like Steve Jobs wouldn’t have tolerated.

It’s especially annoying on some older films with short end credits because it happens before the movie is even over.

You should consider moving to Japan then. Theater stays dark until the last line of credits passes. Actually this is nice thing. You can still listen to the music, pay silent respects to the horde of people involved or just contemplate the movie.

many many people in LA stay for the credits too. naturally.

Thanks for staying for the credits! I make credits for a living, so I’m biased, but you’re right that they serve a real artistic purpose, as a gentle transition from the dream world back to the real one. No one likes to be shaken awake and bombarded with a new dream — especially when they haven’t yet made sense of the last one.

> They serve a real artistic purpose, as a gentle transition from the dream world back to the real one. No one likes to be shaken awake and bombarded with a new dream — especially when they haven’t yet made sense of the last one.

This really hits it for me. It's not even the credits that I need, per se, as long as the movie stop playing when it's done, whether with a credits sequence or a simple fade to black.

I waited for Stranger Things to come out on BluRay (currently waiting for the third season), and I'm 100% convinced I had a better experience than someone watching on Netflix, because the episodes actually ended after the credits. For a show few people will get to see this way, the writers really knew how to conclude each episode in just the right spot, so you had a nice place to take a breather and contemplate.

This reminds me of AMC's Lost finale, where after the end of the show, AMC added a simple shot of a desert island with some lapping waves, just to give viewers thirty seconds to digest everything that had happened.

Of course, this confused the shit out of many viewers, who thought it was part of the show and tried to find meaning in it...

I get the sentiment for live performance, but in your own home, I can not relate to this. Vast majority of people in credits are doing a job and getting paid for it, just like any other profession or trade.

We don't pay "respect" to delivery drivers, or to designers and engineers who brings us our gadgets and services in same way. Why should I spend my time and attention on credit rolls? It's not like anyone noticing it.

Perhaps I should have said it's disrespectful of me, the audience member. It should be my decision whether to watch to the end or not.

I really enjoy movie watching. I use the credits to contemplate what I just watched. Sometimes to see who played specific roles, or what music was in the film, or the locations. So yes, I do watch the credits.

I know most people don't. But that decision should be mine or yours.

You don't tip? Tips are showing your respect for deliveries. Also, most gadgets I've seen have a screen that can be viewed with credits in them, as well as most software. Video games have credits too. Books have credits too, right there on the cover and is probably what grabs your attention more than the title.

No, I hardly ever tip my delivery drivers. Tip is not expected for normal service here, unlike USA. If someone goes above and beyond, you can tip but there is no obligation. We have minimum wage system and most in my area are paid above that.

Most popular gadgets with screens, smartphones, doesn’t have credits, not the most popular apps on App Store apart from couple of words “From Facebook”, “By Google” etc. It’s not considered “incredibly disrespectful” to not read credits in apps or acknowledgments in books that have it listed. It’s a personal preference to read or skip them. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.

Yes, when was the last time you actually saw the credits on those devices? Like who is the lead designer of your phone? Who is the lead programmer of the last game you played?

There are credits in the About menu of about 50% of the programs I use each day.

There are even credits in the loading screen of Adobe Photoshop.

That is not my point. Things being there doesn't make them important

They are so not important that the company decided that is the first thing you should see every single time you launch the app.

There is a world of difference between a title screen and end credits. People are usually there for the title screen. Nobody is objecting to that

Pre-1980s, all credits for feature films were at the beginning of the film. When the film was over, a nice "The End" card would come up, and then fade to black. That was it. Somewhere in the 80s it flipped to just above the line credits at the beginning of the film, and then full credits at the end. As time goes on, it seems like fewer people care about the people making the thing than just using up the labor of the creators with little appreciation.

Ok I'm sorry but that's what the money is for.

Of the services you listed, I only have Netflix. I hated that too, fortunately you can disable it [0]. Perhaps your other services have a similar setting.

[0] - https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102

Neither of those settings help on web. You can stop the previews when you’re browsing around. And you can stop the auto play of the next episode. I have both of those turned off. The annoying one I get hit with (on web) is that when you get to the end of a whole series (or movie, I guess) they roll more or less straight into another trailer.

Bojack Horseman; I laughed, I cried, I lived...I jumped up out of my seat after six seasons to turn off some offensive trailer when it was finally over.

That setting doesn't disable the shrinking of a movie down to a thumbnail at the end. It only disables the auto-starting of the next episode of a TV show.

Huh, fixed it for me on my Chromecast. IIRC it would shrink down to show what was autoplaying next, so when I disabled that it stopped shrinking.

Thanks for the info. It's possible I'm mistaken or that it behaves differently for movies vs TV shows. I'll pay attention tonight and update back here. If it is behaving differently between platforms, that seems like a bug I should report to Netflix.

Confirmed I have the auto play settings off but at the end of a movie just as the credits roll the Apple TV Netflix app shrinks the movie to a thumbnail. :-(

> It is incredibly disrespectful to the film.

I found this attitude a bit confusing. The film makers are not there, who are you showing respect to? Also, do you read each crew members name? If not, what's the point of sitting through it?

To me, it's like speaking loudly in a library, or people horse-playing in a museum. Perhaps it's more accurate to say it's disrespectful of the audience.

I want to be in control of whether or not to watch to the very end. It should be my choice.

Your "time to digest" is Netflix's "fleeting window of opportunity to keep you engaged" or whatever businessy term describes that.

They aren't Facebook. They just need to keep me subscribed, not engaged.

I bet someone has an engagement OKR anyway, though.

Hours of video watched per month is metric Netflix tries to optimize, because it predicts churn. If a customer is spending decreasing hours on Netflix and watching Disney instead, they are more likely to cancel.

Goodhart's law applies. If a customer is watching more Netflix because they are binging some fantastic new context, that’s great for Netflix. If the customer watching more because the app keeps auto playing something they didn’t ask for and gradually pisses them off, not so good. Netflix might have better ways of measuring customer satisfaction that can tell if these behaviors make the customer more satisfied overall.

Yep, this is what I hate. Finishing a TV show, taking it all in, only to find myself scrambling for the remote to press Watch Credits so it doesn’t move on to some random trailer.

The Kodi Netflix add-on might not have the best interface, but at least it doesn’t do stuff like this!

Note that this anti anti feature was introduced quietly so not everyone may have noticed it yet.

What you still can’t turn off AFAIK is the video starting to play in the background if you go to the “more info” menu. At least on the Android TV app.

I have it turned off in my profile, which works nearly everywhere, but doesn't have any effect on the Apple TV netflix app.

oh cool

> Ads on Amazon Prime are infuriating. And I can't help think how annoying it must be for people with disabilities.

I usually watch TV with subtitles on (it means I can have the volume a little lower), and I find that cases where pre-roll ads are inserted either don't adjust the subtitle sync or don't adjust it properly. Amazon's subtitles are generally 1-2s ahead of the video, which is just enough to let the air out of a big reveal or ruin a joke.

> auto playing videos on Netflix

You can now disable this at the account level. They added the option a few months back.

They removed this feature and I like the rollover previews. Where can you change this?

Pretty annoying when they run you trailers of a sequel before you even finished the first one because 'you might be interested' - sometimes even the thumbnail is a spoiler.

My current favourite sketch about popup ads: https://twitter.com/thepincomedy/status/1349299943576662017?...

Actually, ads on Prime videos are for their other shows, and skippable. I discovered nice shows that way. But I agree, we should have at least 2 easy options in settings:

- Never show ads for other shows - Always skip opening themes

> Ads on Amazon Prime are infuriating. And I can't help think how annoying it must be for people with disabilities.

Or people with small kids.

Yes wtf, I'm already paying and trying to watch a series I enjoy, stop pestering me. Just one of many dark patterns at Amazon, cancelling Prime is so difficult that Norwegan Consumer Council and 15 others yesterday started a legal fight with Amazon: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-nytt/amazon-manipulates-... The video there is quite aggravating.

As if that wasn't enough, the full complaint shows that after all that scrolling and clicking (I lost count), an email is sent with a big yellow button, and the website starts showing the same button, "Continue your membership", which re-subscribes with a single click.

Anyone who thinks charging a user $99 with a single click and no explanation near the button should be sent to UX jail (where the only way to get food is to come up with a grep command the warden needs to find part of a street address).

A recurring $99 -- I can't think of any other subscription service that doesn't take you through an explicit approval for signing up.

I've cancelled Prime, now they hit me with week long delivery times which after a day are reduced by half or less, just to get me back on Prime.

I still have prime, and a good half of my "next day shipping" deliveries are delayed by a day, two days or even more.

Granted, the current situation is problematic, but this happened even before and since you are prime, you don't get any money back or something like that. It's just bad luck then.

Now, you might think you could rely on the services where you pay extra for same-day delivery or morning next day. But those end up missing the delivery window a good half of the times I used them - even before the pandemic.

Next day or same day delivery just isn't something that seems to work reliably here in Western Europe.

I know companies where a local driver will literally get in a car and bring me what I need right away, but that doesn't scale to Amazon levels.

Given that prime delivery rarely holds its promise, it is no surprise that Amazon needs to make non-prime delivery even less attractive.

But you know, there are other vendors! Plus, you are less likely to get a fake product if you order directly from there.

Not sure if it still applies since I cancelled prime, but you can contact Amazon any time a package is late, and they will give you credits or extensions to your Prime sub. That was in the US a year or so ago.

It's amazing to me how long deliveries take if you're not prime. Of course the actual delivery is just as fast, they just wait a few days to fill the order.

And the dark patterns on placing an order without re-upping Prime feels like the fake download buttons on download.com without an ad blocker.

I have Prime and, because many of my orders are for business use, I keep being invited to AmazonBusiness where I can download invoices (which I can do already) and buy another kind of Prime or start paying for deliveries again?

That's normal for non-prime. You get thrown onto the back of the priority queue but at the same time get on the wild scheduling ride their systems take.

I just wait for the free month of prime offers and do my Amazon shopping only during that time. Why pay when they keep giving it to me a few times a year.

I'm receiving scam calls from India saying "Your Amazon Prime subscription is about to renew, please talk to our representative if you wish to cancel". If Amazon Prime was easy to cancel this scam wouldn't exist.

(I actually tried going along with the scam, but his call centre was so noisy he couldn't hear what I was saying, ffs.)

I called Amazon to cancel Prime. I wanted them to record my reason for cancelling. And I wanted them to spend some extra money answering my phone call and talking to me.

Honestly, the most annoying thing about this is when they show you an advert for a series that you have already watched. I mean it's not like they don't have the data already...

The ones that really bug me are the generic "Prime Video" ads. Not advertising a particular show, just telling me how great the service I am already subscribed to is...

Most ads I see are for shows I have already decided I will never watch even if they pay me.

The worst - YouTube TV

They show you ads for YouTube TV, literally while are you watching TV with your paid YouTube TV subscription.

How many ad dollars are just being flushed down the drain...

"already have it" seems like a fairly simple, common, and oh so fustrating problems especially for services that already know your email. Right now the worst offender for me is IBKR for egigh I get ~10 ads per day on YouTube despite both being linked the the same IP/email/device/browser as he service.

Likewise with Amazon showing you an ad for a product you literally bought minutes ago as if you'd want to buy another before the first arrives or LinkedIn recruiters trying recruit you to your current role.

Specialty equipment like for photography/cycling or 3d printing is the worst. Buy a Sony camera or Peak design tripod and you'll get ads for the same thing for a year. Like accessories and complementary products I'd understand but come on. Just how many thousand dollar cameras do you expect me to buy per month/year?!

Spot on, I’ve noticed it too. It’s crazy. I can only imagine the XX% of ad spend that could be optimized if this problem was solved across the industry, and the millions of dollars that would be saved...from a basic query optimization? I guess it has to be a harder problem than that, otherwise it wouldn’t be an issue, but sheesh is it ridiculous from the outside looking in.

Like I understand the complexity in optimizing that query for Amazon and personalized product history, etc.

But YouTubeTV for Pete’s sake, is a static property of the network. It doesn’t change for anyone already watching YTV and therefore subscribed.

Just don’t put YTV ads on the YTV network. Simple as that. Someone legit went and added them.

“Already have it”!!!

This is meant to be a replacement for normal cable....which also shows ads. As far as I know there is NO live cable service that is ad-free.

There are also normal ads for third parties. So not a replacement. They just also run their own ads.

And no, it’s not an ad placeholder. Because they have that too. There is a scene that says “you’re watching YoutubeTV, your show will resume momentarily” while a yellow ad bar progresses.

They aren’t also analog ads. You can tell when YTV is playing back an ad recorded within the show, vs when they flip the stream from content to ad content because the UI changes.

Nope, from what I can tell, they definitely just show their own ads to their customers.

When I had Dish, I saw a lot of DirectTV ads. That makes sense. But I never saw Dish advertising Dish. Maybe I just never paid attention.

>This is meant to be a replacement for normal cable....which also shows ads. As far as I know there is NO live cable service that is ad-free.

HBO doesn't show commercials. It DOES use the time between two shows (starting on the hour or half hour) to preview other shows on the same network but I find these slightly less annoying that paid-for ads.

When cable came out it was ad free. That was one of the selling points actually.

You also can't change the UI language with Prime Video. I'm an American in Germany, no option to use English.

On top of that, Prime makes it particularly hard for you to use english. No option to make english the default language for playback. If you switch to english for an episode, the next one starts in german again....

On my samsung TV you can't even change the language from within the menu while watching, you have to close playback, go to playback settings of the movie, change the language, go back to the movie's main menu and then start the movie again.

For some reason, Amazon defaults me to German subtitles, despite me being an American in America.

I hate the ads on Amazon Prime! The same ad, playing over and over every. single. time. And always for something I have no desire to watch, not in the slightest; something slightly offensive to be shown once and definitely offensive to be shown over and over and over.

First world problem, I know. But still highly annoying.

If anyone from Amazon video sees this, I want you to know this is the primary reason I’ve ignored hiring requests from that team (and avoided consuming prime content on prime.) The non-optional ads are infuriating.

I personally don't mind the ads on Amazon Prime because they're instantly skippable and do actually show things I might be interested in. Plus they don't show random shit like ads for a car or a TV or something. I don't sit and browse Amazon (because the browsing experience on Amazon prime is dogshit), so I go straight to anything I want to watch on there. The only opportunity to discover new shows on there is usually from outside of Amazon, or their pre-roll ads.

Also, they should stop showing me ads for things I've watched.

They better not make them unskippable ever.

I don’t think I’ve ever received an ad on Prime Video. Is it an American thing? Do they happen in the U.K. too?

It might be the case that my DNS server (basically PiHole but something I built before PiHole was a thing) is blocking them. However it doesn’t stop inlined ads from YouTube, 4oD, Twitch and other streaming / on demand services.

I'm in UK, using Fire stick in telly, shows skippable ads.

I don’t get ads. Not on a fire stick, via a web browser nor on the LG TV app. Not even a skippable ad. Nothing.

"instantly skippable" depends on device I think. For a long time, there was no "Skip" button in the Roku app, you could only manually forward through it. It has now been added, but very possible there are apps on other devices still missing that feature

My experience - I have a TCL Roku TV, no skip button on the remote. When the promos play on Amazon Prime a Skip control (link? button?) appears on the lower left of the screen with focus. If I press OK on my remote it activates and goes right to the content.

Yep, exactly same in app on regular Rokus - I was referring to the fact that the on-screen "Skip" is a relatively recent addition (at least on my Roku, Roku Express)

The Prime Video experience is slightly better after a recent update. Now when you quickly add something to your watch list, it doesn’t freak out and forget where it was/load entirely new genres.

The ads Amazon added to Twitch prime have been brutal. Nothing re-engaged me in the adblock war than their constant barrage there.

> Same with the ads for Amazon videos on Amazon Prime.

On some smart TVs, there's an explicit (or on-screen) button to skip these. If you don't see a skip button and you have a Fire TV remote, you can press the >> double arrow button to skip these.

I agree that there should be an option to disable these altogether, like how Netflix offers an option to disable video previews.

Same on Cable TV. It's full of ads in the USA - and that's after you pay $100 per month for a cable subscription.

I am cancelling it the moment the expanse is over.

Worst part is, prime crashes my TV's video player. Once that happens I am not able to play any video at all, even on other apps. And ads made it worse since it usually crashes as I switch videos and adds are more video switching.

That and the terrible video quality is what makes me not prolong prime after some free time we got few months ago with some other product. It's like watching 480p Youtube on a 4k tv most of the time. Netflix or Youtube have zero issues like that...

They're annoying, I don't want a trailer recommending me stuff before I watch something, there's already recommendations showing up visually in the list of contents when you choose something..

And yes Amazon, they are ads.

Pay for your content but then torrent the actual viewing experience. Problem solved - on all platforms.

I do torrent movies consistently even though I could watch them directly through my subscription, mainly because of two reasons:

A) Usually my VPN is active and I don't want to shut it down just that netflix/amazon allows my to watch something

B) I like setting the playback speed to ~1.1 of my media player, which is not supported by any streaming provider I'm subscribed to.

You could setup you VPN just on your torrent client

I just blocked all notifications from the Amazon app. Works great.

but they're promoting other Amazon shows and they can't be skipped! what possible other framing could there be.

I still have a free Dropbox account but I'm not buying.

I had 16GB permanent at some point (and up to 50GB temporarily for various promotions) but at some point they cut my account to 10 for no good reason at acted dumb when I asked them about it.

Microsoft gave me 5GB extra for uploading photos and shortly afterwards reduced it, forcing me to delete them, luckily I had them backed up elsewhere.

Google Photos have started trying to monetize what they promised for free to (kind of expected, but with Google they could also have decided to shutter it).

On one hand: we cannot expect companies to give things away for free.

On the other hand: when they've given things away for free unforced it doesn't make them look good when they take away what they gave away.

I now go with hetzner.com or something similar. It is paid and while that doesn't guarantee that they won't do something stupid at least they haven't a massive history of doing stupid things unforced.

Companies throughout history have used the promotional idea of giving something away for free or drastically reduced rates for a new something in order to attract attention. Even drug dealers are known for "the first one's free" type of setup. Storage units have "first month free", cable companies "sign up now for 3 months at $49/mo for 6 months" kind of stuff. It wasn't until sleazy startups and SaaS types come along that do things like "free and always will be" *until we realize we were not good business people and can't run a business like that. Everything else has been regulated up the wazoo, but for some reason tech has been able to avoid these regulations OR flat out ignored them under the guise of "disrupting" the markets.

Washington Post and NY Times digital subscriptions do the same thing. If you subscribe to either, you can try cancelling and they’ll restore the reasonable price.

I’ve just started moving big files into S3/Glacier/B2 (Backblaze API compatible S3 competitor). If you know how to use these tools, they’re far more long term reliable than any Dropbox like service in terms of offering and pricing.

> they just couldn't grok the reason

It's hard to make someone understand something when their salary (and entire reputation - given that increasing engagement/retention by X% is a big selling point on a resume) depends on not understanding it.

This is usually it! As developers, we have all worked on features where it was obvious that users wouldn’t want it, but the feature would juice some metric so it was prioritized. Some time between that initial meeting about how this will juice the metric and launch, Product convinced themselves that users would actually want it and are not prepared to accept the feature’s failure. Finally, when indeed users don’t want to use it, it would get pushed at them repeatedly, through sales and through dark UI patterns. Tale as old as time...

This is what happens when you plan your product not from user need but from company need.

Yes, but usually in that situation, the misunderstanding is intentional. This seemed a genuine inability to understand why I would quit over "a simple upsell".

I am sure the inability to understand that it was a dark pattern to have no [X] or [SKIP] button was intentional :-)

> This seemed a genuine inability to understand why I would quit over "a simple upsell".

Similar situation with major retail chains delivering brochures to a doorstep, or a bank clerk upselling bank credit and investment funds. It's not inability to understand, they are financially rewarded by doing this to you and their supervisors are malicious sociopaths. Their attitude is "why this person doesn't let me do my job".

Well that was simply arrogance that can be see in almost every large organizations: they believe everyone would like their idea. The problem maybe most people do like their idea but there would be always someone does not.

Privately I left Dropbox long ago when they stop supporting bit-by-bit comparison, and moved into chunk-by-chunk check. Found out hard way when detached VeryCrypt secure trunk and attached it day later on another machine. Started scratching my head what the heck. Upon checking, the file was not synced/uploaded and that's how I managed to discover their change.

Business-wise, it was a stuck forced update that made me drop them (pun intended). At some version it did not want to open anymore before update. Fine. The problem was that you could not download update; it was downloader you download and that downloader himself pick file over the internet to download. Problem is the folder and file name was always different causing my simplewall (best firewall I know for Windows 10) to block the file each single time. Before I had chance to fiddle with firewall settings - something I never like doing - I was already registered into lifetime 2TB offer with pCloud, including their "Cyrpto" package for $299 one-time. Never looked back. And also upload speeds I found much faster than DropBox. As of syncing... I think its decent enough. Never had problem. Although their local drive logic is tad different - you are mounting a remote drive which is not equally convenient like DropBox local folder, but at least pCloud does not check folder for changes non-stop.

Disclaimer: have nothing to do with pCloud as a company, just their happy client.

I use Dropbox the same way you did: As a screwdriver. This means, it does its job, it does it well, I'm not looking to make it a part of my life beyond that. I don't want new features or collaboration, and I definitely don't want to pay more than I do or see ads.

The screwdriver-manufacturing business is not very profitable, so nobody wants to be in it.

Good analogy; my hammer manufacturer, Evernote, also has this disease. No, I don't want chat or Evernote for Business ...

> I actually had a conversation with a product manager; I checked the yes you can contact me when I cancelled my account. They simply refused to admit that an upsell was a advertisement and that disrupting my workflow on my paid, professional account for an ad was wrong.

I'm not in the slightest bit surprised. As product management has exploded as a role (look at the number of courses, books, etc.) there has been a huge influx of people with less experience, and most importantly perhaps, less breadth of experience. This is a good thing in the long-term, but there will be growing pains.

I feel like the usual trope for programmers is that "PMs aren't technical enough", but the bigger issue for companies is that they don't have a breadth of experience and develop a narrower set of skills than they historically have. They smart and driven, but cost is what you are seeing with the cognitive dissonance.

This is less noticeable in smaller startups. The problem is exacerbated in more mature products like Dropbox where they are trying to move an existing user base onto a higher profit line of products. You need to have the broader base that PMs at legacy companies (e.g. Microsoft) have to make this shift. Further, it's harder to appear credible with enterprise customers beyond shadow IT.

I dropped them when they restricted free accounts to three devices and I suddenly got inundated with calls from annoyed family and friends to whom I'd spent five years evangelizing.

They are the only company I know that continuously pulls features from existing tiers while raising prices on all tiers.

They act like a monopoly seemingly oblivious to the many viable alternatives out there today.

Yep. I've been gradually replacing them because of that.

I stopped using Dropbox when they stopped allowing bulk note exports in Paper. Paper is so good, but it's ruined by their moat-building. They seem to be headed down a path of increasingly dark patterns.

I immediately download all my Paper notes. On the upside, the bulk downloading option is still available:

Dropbox Paper > Your Icon > Download docs you created.

I wouldn't have moved away from Dropbox if that option existed on my account.

The options I see:

Upgrade

Settings

Install Dropbox app

Sign out

Add team account

I have to say, for all the valid hate it usually gets, iCloud is actually becoming a pretty nice “usb drive in the cloud” compared to the bullshit that is getting tacked on to Dropbox, Google Drive and to a lesser extent OneDrive.

On the other hand, I still keep a large WebDAV/OwnCloud server close for the moment iCloud turns to shit too.

I am early user of Dropbox. Everything was fine and then three devices per account policy arrived. The next morning I deleted all my files. Bought my self a Synology installed Cloud Station and now I have a my own cloud storage, with no ads or shady UX.

In my experience, product people often seem to get some pretty extreme tunnel vision about how the product should work vs. what customers really want. I’ve seen it enough to assume that something about that role incentivizes this behavior.

I had a similar experience after kicking out Box. Sometimes enterprise SW companies get so caught up in the 20% of power users that they forget the value of simplicity for the 80%.

>> they couldn’t grok the reason

B2b enterprise “feature” apps don’t understand the b2c direct to consumer perspective.

I was told a story about the Dropbox sales team a while back that swore me off using them. They contacted the company I worked at, that didn't have a business contract with Dropbox, offering a great deal and a meeting was quickly arranged. The meeting (which I only heard about secondhand from a good friend) quickly turned into a strong-arm operation.

Dropbox had 'detected' that employees at our company were using Dropbox and it would be unfortunate if their stored files were no longer available and it would be in our best interest to sign up for a business account or we might legally be in breach of some terms of service. Some detective work later it was determined that people had been signed in to Dropbox from company machines, but there were no accounts opened with a company email and nothing business related was being synced. All Dropbox binaries and network connections have been blocked since.

The best answer to this tactic is, “Nice Dropbox you have there. Shame if OneDrive were to happen to it.”

The O365 integration with OneDrive is so seamless relative to other options, employees won’t even complain after an initial learning curve. In fact, many will start subscribing to O365 on iOS etc. and start having access to the same content synced across Windows, MacOS, iOS, Xbox, etc.

At this point, with employees adapted and the “M365” data visibility and DLP tools switched on, the enterprise can switch off Dropbox or other file depots so even personal accounts won’t work.

It takes a year or so to play out, but that’s how you lose 20,000 customers at a time.

This is an interesting take, and i agree with you. I myself have used dropbox for personal stuff, and onedrive with several of my previous employers for years now. For any person or business that i know who is all-in on microsoft products/services, i recommend to just adopt leveraging oneDrive, and life for them gets easier. (I didn't say better in other ways...but certainly easier.)

In fact, oneDrive is good enough that i signed up my family for the o365 family plan, because the cost is hard to beat (and because my family doesn't care if their machine is windows or linux)... But, when i went to start mixing in my files (vs my partner's and rest of family's files)...I learned that onedrive does __NOT RUN NATIVELY ON LINUX__ ...and linux is my personal daily driver. Hence, while my family, and all of our collective and shared files (including family photos) live on a paid oneDrive account, my stuff (files that really only pertain to me like dev. projects, etc.) live in dropbox, because dropbox runs decent enough on my linux machine. I can not wait for the day when dropbox is NOT the only decent option for linux machines. (Caveat: I am a big fan of nextcloud, but they're not there just yet...hopefully soon though!)

I mount onedrive on linux pretty well with rclone.

1. Setup rclone with onedrive (you have to copy an oauth token iirc)

2. Run mount

    nohup rclone --vfs-cache-mode writes mount onedrive: ~/onedrive &

I recall giving rclone a glance...but I thought it was more suited for a 1-way file send? (Like a sort of backup approach) So, does rclone work bi-directionally? In other words, if I add a file to my oneDrive via, say,mobile...as long as I setup rclone it will sync back to my laptop, and vice versa, etc.??

Rclone doesn't support bi directional sync. The only way to do this is to create two different folders and sync them seperately

Ok, yeah that was what I recalled too. Although that does not diminish the coolness of rclone, and I will have other use-cases that requires its use. I just need a bidirectional synch for my linux machines. Thanks!

I have been happy with this OneDrive client on Ubuntu for the last year: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/

Thanks! I had heard of another popular onedrive client for linux too (can't recall the name)...but have been hesitant to use such a client. Maybe it's time to try one; this one! Thanks for sharing!

We use Onedrive at my work. It's a little annoying because OneDrive reads through your Word documents and tells you that you actually can't save that file here, because it has some external font or macro inside it. I like that Dropbox and Box don't look inside your files and I really hope Microsoft copies that feature soon.

I'm going to hazard a guess that this is a function of saving into a Sharepoint Library that appears as file/document storage. This would likely work if you were saving into a folder that's then synced via OneDrive.

The commentary that I've seen really has Sharepoint as the storage for anything that may be shared with other users (via file, Teams, whatever) and OneDrive as storage for files that are strictly for one user.

Caveat: not an expert on this

Yes the O365 integration is relatively seamless and we were forced to move from Dropbox to Onedrive after our IT guys consolidated all of our subscriptions.

But damn, the OneDrive client at least on my MacBook is complete garbage, it seems like basic features compared to the Dropbox Client are completely missing, and OneDrive regularly likes to randomly use so much CPU that the fans spin up.

Given how heavily OneDrive is targeted towards businesses and offices, you'd think that LAN syncing would have been one of the first features to include....

> Dropbox had 'detected' that employees at our company were using Dropbox and it would be unfortunate if their stored files were no longer available and it would be in our best interest to sign up for a business account or we might legally be in breach of some terms of service.

That's such a dumb sales tactic. Having users inside a company without any contracts with the company means that there are probably evangelists for the product working there but management won't buy. Time to give a free trial of the pro-enterprise-moneymaker version and hope that someone decide it's worth it.

Well, the tactic worked for Oracle, and I would assume some of those lawyers landed at other SV companies. Although, to be fair to Oracle, they didn't do dark pattern stuff when I used them.

The problem for Dropbox is that social media makes these strong arm tactics harder, as the victims have an opportunity to put the company on blast publicly and trash their reputation. 20 years ago companies could do this repeatedly for a longer period of time before they’d gain a reputation for being scummy.

But then look at how their "cloud" is doing.

Is anyone anywhere in SV building new products on top of Oracle?

Oracle isn't an SV focused company. There is plenty of money in all those non-tech businesses to be a big winner.

I really wish mobile OSes would allow you to grant apps permissions but serve fake data, (that's important!) without giving the app the ability to tell the difference. Just so it appears to the app that you've given the permission, when you in fact have not. This would solve this entire class of problems and then some. So, for example:

- App "has" access to contacts, but the system returns that you have none.

- App "has" access to location, but the search for GPS satellites never completes.

- App "has" access to storage, but it's actually /dev/null.

Apple solved this pretty well I thought. The developer guidelines say that you cannot require a permission as a condition of using an app. If the user says no, you must gracefully degrade. You can’t exit(0) or put up an undismissable screen until you get the permission. Apps that violate this are supposed to get kicked out of the store.

That’s not quite the full story. If your app absolutely must have the permission to operate, then it can be exempted from this requirement. I imagine “absolutely must” is up to interpretation.

> I imagine “absolutely must” is up to interpretation.

There is no way for app developers to "force" additional privileges.

They still can't exit(0), but for instance a GPS tracking app (navigation, running, whatever) that isn't allowed access to the GPS can't very well function without GPS access, so in that case your app is allowed to fail.

They cannot be excempted from asking for, and abiding by the users decision, but they can be excempted for not working "as advertised" should the user not provide the needed capabilities.

YouTube TV still gets me though. Requires GPS access and won't let me access my hometown sports without it.

Probably due to the blackout provisions of the contracts to carry hometown sports.

LineageOS 16 used to have this feature. I really miss it. https://forum.fairphone.com/t/transitioning-from-los16s-priv...

Sad to have just learned from that link that Privacy Guard is gone. That has indeed been a key Cyanogen/LineageOS feature for me for years (my phone is still on 16). I can't say I understand the decision to remove it.

While for contacts and location that would be a good feature (I agree!), I'm not so sure about storage. It may be nice for certain rogue apps (or ones that request permissions they don't actually need) to give them /dev/null without them knowing, but that may actually result in bugs and unstable behaviour if apps are written to expect working storage.

Storage doesn't have a built-in failure mode like contacts and location have.

Okay, you're probably right. It might be a better option to give an app a sandboxed storage location instead, just so the files it put there remain there because it might expect to find them there later.

... isn't that exactly what access to storage does? Do any (mobile) platforms give access to NON sandboxed storage?

All apps get sandboxed storage without even asking. On Android at least, permission for "storage" means permission for an area shared between all apps. And a lot of apps dump stuff into it that you do not necessarily want every other app to have access to.

It's always been that way.

What it really needs is some kind of compartments, so that you can share storage between X and Y, and between Z and W, but not between X and W.

I just installed Signal two days ago and enabled backups.

This asked, understandably, for storage permission. This prompted me to give access to the sdcard, however, I had the option to select a single folder (or actually directly creating it within the prompt) that the app will have access to. I.e. Signal now has access to sdcard/signalbackups/ but not to the whole sdcard. (unless this whole new permission process wasn't Android but the Signal app. I rarely download apps and have to give storage permissions).

This used to be different, but times of giving access to full internal or external sdcards are over. Unfortunately though, the UX isn't perfect. I felt like I needed to know that I only want to give it access to a part of the sdcard and actively look that this is indeed possible. But that might be my bias from previous usage talking.

No, sandboxed means restricted to that application. Apps need permissions to access data outside of their sandbox. They are suggesting that there be another sandboxed storage for apps that pretends to be read data.

> Storage doesn't have a built-in failure mode like contacts and location have.

Yes it does: disk full. It's perhaps a bit less reasonable to expect a program to keep working properly in such a case, but it needs to be handled somehow.

App developers find out about this practice as it gets more commonplace. They add a check for 'empty' data or resolution failures. If these checks notice that you had been providing null or fake data, the app now gives you an intrusive yet pleading popup to please lift the privacy measures.

You get annoyed, resenting the fact that your friends are using this piece of garbage. Reluctantly you lift the measures, forget about it, and just keep using the app.

Just like with adblockers and anti-adblockers, you then go one level deeper...

It's a cat-and-mouse game. As long as you have full control over your device, you win.

At some point we're going to have to reverse engineer apps and come up with hopefully free software replacements...

That would get you banned in the Apple App Store

Although it’ll never happen a cool idea would be to serve trap addresses and phone numbers so the developer can receive an instant ban if spam ends up on these addresses

This would, of course, be immediately abused to ban competitors' apps.

You would serve a different trap address to each app, nobody but Dropbox would have the Dropbox trap.

Nobody but Dropbox and anyone with the Dropbox app on their phone. It has to get from the user's phone to Dropbox, which means it's on the user's phone at some point, barring some sort of convoluted user --> Apple --> Dropbox transfer scheme.

Right, the Dropbox app on their phone is asking the OS for contact info, which the phone generates and provides to the Dropbox app and only the Dropbox app. Any other app would get a different fake address.

Or are you talking about the scenario where competitor apps use some kind of sandbox escape to jump out and steal other apps' trap addresses from the OS?

I figure that's what @ceejayoz is talking about. This probably won't happen between 'mom and pop' apps, but maybe a failing SV unicorn might become desperate enough to pay $1MM, or however much a blackhat will ask for this service, to trash their main competitor.

This is an awesome idea.

iOS almost allows this for geo-location nowadays, where one can pick whether to give ones exact position or a much less exact position, and for photos where one can select exactly what photos the app should get access to.

Does android have this API? The problem I see is, if they are introduced in later versions, people are anyway used to apps asking these permissions and developers don't bother to use these.

Also, a question to security experts: In many apps say we want a UX where the user would immediately be able to see their recent pics and select from them (think recent photos bar in whatsapp), but app shouldn't be able to access them. Is it safe if OS provides it as a screen overlay service which doesn't require a separate screen/window, but runs out of process (a la file picker).

Android has a better API, and has had it for at least 5 years. An app can open the system UI for you to choose a file, and it would then only get access to that particular file while the activity (screen) that requested it is running. As far as the user is concerned, this requires no permissions. Under the hood, the app gets a content:// URI with an "URI permission" granted. This is also how sharing (Intent.ACTION_SEND) works. You could as well use this mechanism to expose the content in your app to other apps in a controlled manner.

Yep. Android also has a Contact Picker that doesn't require contacts permissions where you just select a single person in a dialog.

I have never seen it used in a real app. Most apps request permission to your entire address book.

iOS does this for photos as of iOS 14: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/24/ios-14-users-give-apps-...

I wish there was an easier way to add additional photos quickly. From what I understand the only way is search for the app in settings, open the "Photos" permission and click on "Edit Selected Photos". Is there an easier way I missed? I guess I can't expect a simple click from within the app itself while selecting photos, as it's not aware it's seeing a limited selection.

I think it requires developers to fix that. At least in Slack there's two buttons next to their in-app image picker. One opens the camera to take a photo, the other pops up the iOS photo picker overlay where you can select more images.

I used to have a rooted android phone that could do this. If I remember correctly it was called Xposed Framework. I could even fake GPS data which was extremely useful in all kinds of apps. I also remember power usage increasing significantly after I installed this.

iOS has started doing this, at least for photos.

OPPO's colourOS as this.

> The Personal Information Protection feature is a very clever way to bypass this situation. You can turn on protection for call logs, contacts, messages, and events. Once protection is enabled, ColorOS 11 will send apps empty information, tricking the app into accessing the blank data.

https://www.xda-developers.com/oppo-coloros11-privacy/

I use xprivacy lua in android that does exactly this. It's not simple for general public though and it needs root.

Does it still work in recent Android versions though?

Depends if your rom supports edxposed properly which is for android 9 onwards.

I love this idea! Unfortunately the creator of the most popular mobile OS is also one of the worst offenders in this regard.

Given how things are going with big tech lately I wouldn't be shocked to see Google implement this feature, but with exception criteria that just so happens to apply to all Google apps.

Yes, but it cannot be the sole feature. This should be done for compatibility with old apps, but also explicitly forbidden in the app stores that any app try to work around that by doing any kind of active detection.

"Sign in with Apple" kind of has something like this. It can give the application a randomly generated email address that acts as a forwarding address. The application never receives my real email address.

Not quite the same thing, but if you use Sign in with Apple, the application gets an Apple email address, and Apple forwards the email on to you.

Facebook Login used to have this as an option too, but stopped years ago.

An "easy" implementation would be to allow the user specify which contacts db is shared. User could then have multiple contact lists -- a fake one, a work one, a personal, etc.

You could check MIUI or Realme which already has that feature.

They’d detect it easily and refuse to work.

But iOS 14 let’s you do this for photos at least.

Well, from user perspective would be useful, but I don't have much expectations it would be implemented in, say, Android. They ofcourse want quality data.

Haven't done in-depth Android development, but I believe there is option to fake some GPS data? Ofcourse, not that helpful if you want 1 app to have real data, the other... not so real.

Proper way would be force devs think about REQUIRED and OPTIONAL permissions you can give. REQUIRED permissions are given on launch (or maybe you just get useless app), OPTIONAL permissions for improved features and fails gracefully if not given. It currently works that way, but is up to developer to implement it that way.

Perhaps adding advantage to those apps that do not REQUIRE sensitive permissions. Say a filter in Play Store you can use to filter our apps that require X permissions to work. In some cases, devs would be incentivized to REQUIRE less permissions.

When writing this comment, I thought about another solution. User profiles on android. Like on browser, where you get your own cookies etc. Googled around and.. looks like Android has something to offer!? Doesn't solve location, but perhaps Storage/Contacts.

https://source.android.com/devices/tech/admin/multi-user

https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2865483?hl=en

> Notifications appear for all accounts of a single user at once.

> Notifications for other users do not appear until active. Each user gets a workspace to install and place apps.

> No user has access to the app data of another user.

> Any user can affect the installed apps for all users.

> The primary user can remove apps or even the entire workspace established by secondary users.

I'm primarily an Android developer myself and I do respect my users <s>and that's why I have no job</s>, so yes, I request permissions only when they're absolutely necessary and when it's obvious as to why the permission is needed.

The bigger problem, though, is that you can't trust bad actors to act good. DNT in browsers has showed that extremely clearly: it was meant as a marker for you to not be tracked, yet advertisers used it as an additional bit for fingerprinting. Policy might be a way, but it relies on humans looking at apps. It's always much more effective to have technical measures in place, if possible. As in, no mater how much you'd like, you can't track a user across the web if their browser doesn't accept third-party cookies. And many app developers are in no way better than web developers with their incentives, intentions and tactics, it's just that the web makes these issues more noticeable.

*sigh*

I would pay a lot of money for a service like the one Dropbox was in in its first few years. That is the service that I need now, not all this shiny crud.

I've been a Dropbox user for 12+ years.

I imagine it as buying a car 10 years ago because it solved all your mobility needs (shopping, occasional longer trips, dropping kids/family members to their events etc). You wander into the garage 12 years later and you have this monstrosity with five wheels, built-in backseat crayons, 20-feet long, flippers, and just two functional doors.

I don't need that. I certainly don't want that, and I'm actively looking to move away when my annual renewal comes up.

Depending on your platforms of choice, iCloud Drive has been a great solution for me. I was an early Dropbox user who got out when they started limiting the number of syncing devices for free accounts a while back, and the $0.99 a month I pay to Apple for 50GB of storage in a folder that appears on all my devices works exactly like I want it to - I save stuff there, and then forget about it until I need it, and its magically on whatever device I'm using.

Sync could be a feature, or sync could be a product. But the lesson seems to be that if your product is sync, and you grow big and take lots of outside money to do it, sync won't be your product for very long. You'll need to expand and try to do everything else that could use good sync as a feature.

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile...

And you may find yourself paying for 5TB of cloud storage with feature bloat...

And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?"

The car analogy is a good one. Try finding a decent new car that doesn't come with a cell connection and respects your privacy.

I'm more concerned by how they tie the car to short-lived services and technologies. A car shouldn't be obsoleted by the software that powers its dashboard.

Remember when this(1) was Dropbox? Remember how beloved it was because it did a thing and did it well, without complicating things or being actively user-hostile? Well, of course it's been fully MBA'd at this point, a true shame.

(1) https://i.ibb.co/w6zcwYW/Screen-Shot-2021-01-15-at-10-49-22-...

Kind-of sounds like Steve Jobs was right in what he told Drew Houston: Dropbox is a feature, not a product.

Houston disagreed and they've spent all this time ever since trying to prove Jobs wrong. Meanwhile Apple built iCloud and Microsoft built OneDrive into their operating systems.

Link to answer: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other...

I remember reading this when it was first written. Ironically, Quora was also much simpler and better back then before turning into a spammy bloated mess.

The reason I did a screenshot was because I couldn't reliably link to this answer on Quora. What a dumpster fire that site's become too.

Click on the timestamp for a direct link to the answer. Most social sites follow this UX pattern.

Even when I did that, it wouldn't reliably scroll to the correct location. Not sure if it's because of my ad blocking or what.

DropBox seems to have decided that the only way for them to grow is to turn their data sync platform into a collaborative platform. Makes a whole lot of sense to steal contacts from all your users.

FYI - never use oauth to log into anything you care about.

I am not so sure if oauth is to blame alone. I mean, it is a technology that lets you control what you want to share. However, engaging in business with a partner who decides to change the rules, is something I see a lot more critical.

So maybe the lesson should sound more like

- 'Don't use Dropbox for anything you care about' or

- 'Don't do business with large corporations for anything you care about'

To clarify, I am not saying it to protect oauth (in its current state I am not a particular fan of it), but to show, that the technology doesn't change by itself and that someone decided to change it. So the company who decided to execute this unethical change should take its share of the blame too.

Isnt the point here that you don't have control? Seems like you need to allow contact access to use google login at all.

There is no fine grained control to permissions.

That's not oauth, that's just the granularity the auth provider has decided to expose in its permissions system, and the granularity Dropbox have opted to request.

That's oauth in the sense that if you login with your own login/pass, this will never be something they can force on you. I never use oauth, always login/pass, and don't have to care about what permissions they ask me, it's easy, they have absolutely zero access to my gmail/facebook/twitter whatever.

Sadly, you can't have a product that does one thing and does it well when you have to show never-ending growth to investors :(

Even more sadly that same thing seems to be true of FOSS applications because people think an application you aren't constantly updating and adding features to is "abandoned".

Software isn't allowed to just be done anymore.

Well, fortunately, there are exceptions. Case in point being XFCE. It has remained the same for years.

However, your point still stands, because exceptions are just that, exceptions.

> FYI - never use oauth to log into anything you care about.

Interesting remark. I'm not objecting but it's interesting that this goes against what can one read here very often from people who comment on new products, which goes like this: "if you offered oauth sign up, I'd sign up but won't bother with creating an account". Just an observation.

I'm the opposite. 'only Google and Facebook Auth ? Can't create account ? Bye.'

not discount, discontinue of course

do you mean OpenID? I guess oauth is OK for signups if the tokens were expiring. But usually you naively give the credentials to a new startup, only to find out they abuse them months later.

Can you elaborate on that? How can they abuse it? Your oauth provider will show you which permissions the app is requesting when you grant them access. What kind of abuse have you seen?

Is there an oauth provider that offers what mobiles have started to do with permissions, where "deny" just gives empty data to to the requesting application instead of actually rejecting the claim?

It'd be nice to see Google offer something like that.

Facebook does this with theirs for access to a user’s Pages. Just an empty array, which isn’t unusual for normal users.

Makes it tough for third-party devs to debug a legit “I am not seeing Page X as an option” though.

> FYI - never use oauth to log into anything you care about.

I definitely agree with this. While it's true that Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple are probably better at securing accounts than most other companies, there's always the possibility that they can be compromised.

Another problem is that if your oauth provider decides to close your account for whatever reason, it may be difficult or impossible to unlink everything from it.

Not only do I create real accounts for any service I want to use, I divide them up among multiple separate email accounts, so that if one account is compromised, I limit the associated services that are vulnerable as a result.

My Spotify is broken since I deleted my Facebook. I can't even change the email in my profile.

Contact Spotify support. Had a similar problem where I had a leftover Facebook-Spotify account after delinking that blocked my normal account from changing my email. Spotify support was quick to help me.

> FYI - never use oauth to log into anything you care about.

Or, "Then create a password and revoke oauth permissions from the provider"

These days all browsers offer to generate and save a syncable password for you and fill in the email, so it's almost as easy to make a normal account as it is to use OAuth. It feels like OAuth/SSO is a tool for a different, less user-friendly era.

Not following. What's wrong with oauth?

When Google's AI (=RNG) decides to terminate your account (maybe you typed a few too many comments on YouTube, this has happened to people), you'll lose every service for which you used Google to sign in with.

Also, the usual tracking stuff.

In addition, you are limited to the few providers which are being supported by the platform. So you can't simply create your own authentication provider as it was possible with OpenID.

Don't websites usually create an association between a local user (in their DB) and an oauth2 account, linked by the email address? And then all your data is linked to the local DB user. I guess it's a bigger threat if you don't use your own domain for email.

EDIT: I'm talking about sites that also have their own local user db of course, so you could just do a password reset.

Syncthing might be a good option for those that wish to migrate. It is a stable open-source solution for syncing a directory in many-to-many clients situation. The syncthing itself provides no servers. But if you wish to have a central server it could be as easy as just installing synchting on your main machine or a cheap VPS. The UI is good enough and it is stable.

Syncthing has been working very reliably for our agency, with multiple users reading/writing to shared projects, with a NAS elected as "master" (though ST doesn't care who's who). Frankly impressive for an OSS project.

However setting up and managing Syncthing is far from self-explanatory for a non-technical audience. It's OK in our case as we can hand-hold and onboard people in-house, but not ideal. Syncthing's usability would benefit immensely from an updated front-end UX, consistent across platforms.

Dropbox for all its recent dark patterns and upsells is still one of the most intuitive systems. Yes, the client UX has worsened, but the core service retains a very predictable behaviour. A folder is a folder. Shared with X and Y. When un-sharing or deleting a folder or file the options are clearly communicated. Compare this with Google Drive, where a "file" can become orphaned and keep existing in limbo, where it's invisible in the browser or filesystem, but it's discoverable by search. It drove us nuts multiple times making it very hard to track access to old documents without having to update settings one-by-one, etc. Google Drive feels like an afterthought to accompany the otherwise great Docs, Slides. and Sheets.