Lemmy bring biased again?
OP literally changed the title to include iPhone when the actual title from the link says screen recording.
Comment on T-Mobile secretly records iPhone screens and claims it's being helpful.
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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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.
dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Jordan117@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I wonder if this would include on-screen notifications.
bluemellophone@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That would be a pretty big security hole in iOS if that was allowed, but it isn’t. Notification and other UI elements are rendered on top of the underlying app, which does not have access to or cannot see the full screen’s canvas. We can see practical implementations of this “snapshot” test feature in code:
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Not the tools I’ve used. A lot of them aren’t even actually recording video. They’re recording the user interactions in-app, then playing those back on a cached version of the experience that is hosted with the session recording company.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Sorry to lazy to go through articles like this, do they mention if this is just in the US or something? Or do they also do this in the EU?
LilB0kChoy@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Does T-Mobile operate in Europe? I thought they were a US carrier.
Thrashy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Sorta yes and no. T-Mobile US is its own corporate entity, but their majority shareholder is Deutsche Telekom, and they take their name from that company’s mobile service brand.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
They are German as far as I am aware, but that doesnt mean they do the same crap in Europe as they do in the US hence my question
LilB0kChoy@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
The article doesn’t specify where and they don’t say T-Mobile US. They do say that it’s the T-Life app that records the screen while using it.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is so. At the bottom of the article it says:
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.
underline960@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
For quality assurance reasons, we’ve defined ‘within the app’ as ‘everything on the phone while our app is running in the background’.
pixely@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Lyrl@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
It’s not possible at all, no permission exists that lets an Android app record something in another app. Much to the sadness of the mobile Hearthstone community that would love collection managers and stat tracking apps like what PC and Mac have.
disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The API for iOS screen recording is sandboxed to the app itself. There is currently no system-wide screen recording API for developers.
kalleboo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
iOS does have an API for apps to record these screen 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
AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
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.
HelloHotel@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Last I checked, you can have a system app as an accessability provider enabled as its factory defaults
Lyrl@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
It’s not possible on Android, which is incredibly disappointing because I play a card game exclusively on mobile, and would love to use a collection manager and stat tracking app. These exist for PC and Mac, but not for mobile because of the very hard no-record-other-apps wall.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
several ways
lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
You’d need something to hook into the memory or storage of the app I guess?