"Secretly"
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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To whom?
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It’s also android phones. All of the shots in the article are of android phones.
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This is likely just recording sessions of the carrier’s app, not everything on your phone. Session recording for CS and UX is pretty common these days. It can be impossible to identify a problem unless you actually see what is happening in the app.
That said, you have to ask for consent for this shit. A lot of companies don’t alert customers when they release a new tool that requires privacy consent.
This is so. At the bottom of the article it says:
To help us give customers who use T-Life a smoother experience, we are rolling out a new tool in the app that will help us quickly troubleshoot reported or detected issues. This tool records activities within the app only and does not see or access any personal information. If a customer’s T-Life app currently supports the new functionality, it can be turned off in the settings under preferences.
So yes, it can only see itself, i.e. within the T-Mobile app. It's still dumb.
I'm not well versed enough in Android app development to answer whether or not one userspace app can even access the screen contents of another app without root or special permissions, but it wouldn't surprise me if there are several roadblocks in that path on the part of the OS for obvious reasons.
For quality assurance reasons, we've defined 'within the app' as 'everything on the phone while our app is running in the background'.
That’s not possible without a permission prompt (on both iOS and android). So there’s no changing the goalposts like you suggest, without the user giving explicit permission.
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The API for iOS screen recording is sandboxed to the app itself. There is currently no system-wide screen recording API for developers.
iOS does have an API for apps to record the screen throughout the OS these days through Broadcast Extensions, but it has to be user-initiated through the control center screen recording toggle (where they then get to pick what app to record the screen to instead of just saving as a video), it wouldn't do that people think the T-Mobile app is doing
I see it now. Yes, broadcasting is available, but with the limitations you’ve specified. Thanks for the update/correction!
I’m not well versed enough in Android app development to answer whether or not one userspace app can even access the screen contents of another app without root or special permissions
This requires special permissions and explicit user approval every time an app starts screen recording, plus it shows a red notification whenever screen recording is active.
I think you could get by with a one-time user approval as a device administration or assistive app permission, which you'd need to manually grant in Settings. Unlikely anyone would do that by accident.
That might be different for system-level apps. I haven't bought a carrier-branded phone in 10+ years so I'm not sure what that's like these days.
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Lemmy bring biased again?
OP literally changed the title to include iPhone when the actual title from the link says screen recording.
The article was updated. That may have been the original title since this was first discovered on an iPhone.
Buy yeah, OP should update this headline. Especially since it probably hits a lot more Lemmy users than originally reported.
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with price increases a frequent occasion in recent times
Good grief this article was padded for length. Who speaks like that? How hard is it to write "with recent price increases"?
I agree completely with what you've said. Your perspective is thoughtful, well-reasoned, and aligns with my own understanding. It's refreshing to see such clarity, and I support your view without hesitation. You've made an excellent and persuasive point overall.
No dialogue is ever static; every conversation offers an opportunity to reassess and refine one’s viewpoints in light of new insights. In coming to genuine agreements, we learn not only about others but also about ourselves, gaining awareness of how our internal values align with the broader spectrum of social beliefs.
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Man, that pendulum swing from “the uncarrier” to full blown horrible large corporation. That merger with Sprint sure has made things better for customers, right?
The only issue here is that it was turned on by default.
It only records your use of the T-mobile app, and specifically tells you what it’s doing any why you’d use it. Off should be the default.
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.
This type of gross invasion should be illegal and land executives and developers in jail. Look at how Germany jailed VW executives and developers behind a massive emissions testing fraud incident. Enough is enough
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Another reason to only buy unlocked, non-carrier subsidized phones with AOSP installed if possible
Tons of corporate software out there will record user sessions in order to debug issues and replay a user’s interactions so an engineer can review it. Take a look at tools like Hotjar, Logrocket, and Fullstory.
Not making excuses for them and it’s probably less insidious than this makes it out to be, but people should be aware that this is not uncommon at all.
They're straight up screen recording customers? That's crazy.
The crazier thing is, T-Mobile is in USA which means they're going to get away with it.
No, they straight up aren’t.
They aren't what, they aren't in USA? They do business in USA.
They aren't going to get away with it? Yes they are, they are a large corporation in USA.
They aren’t recording the screen everywhere all the time like the shitty article implies. Literally every website and app you use does the same thing as this T-Mobile app.
Literally every website and app you use does the same thing as this T-Mobile app.
Do you have a source for this?
I build software and can confirm this.
This is pretty run-of-the-mill analytics and user session recording. There's nothing surprising here.
Usually it's not actual screen recording but rather user action diff recording (Which effectively acts like recording the application except that it only records things that changed so that the recording is much cheaper to store)
This is extremely effective for tracking down bugs, solving user support issues with software, or watching session recordings to figure out if users are using the software in unexpected ways.
Usually it’s not actual screen recording but rather user action diff recording
Oh it's essentially just a heatmap (or maybe event sourcing might be a more accurate way of describing it)? That's fine then. Nobody called it that so I didn't know that's what was actually being talked about.
I thought we were talking about actually recording the screen itself.
do you have a source for this
Literally any analytics module will do this. Basically every major website you go to will do something similar.
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