[minutillo]

On iOS you can easily check what permissions an app has in Settings. For instance I can see I have granted Instagram access to location, microphone, camera, photo album. Threads has none of those. I don't use Health and I'm not sure what financial data would mean, Apple Pay? That's approved per each use.

If threads has figured out a way to collect those things without having permissions, then yes, that would be the darkest of dark patterns.

[autoexec]

So instagram has access to view, collect, and analyze the photos you take of yourself and your environment as well as the ability to access your other photos, your location and your microphone. That alone could let them collect vast amounts of information about your health and your finances.

Your location data for example tells them where you live. Possibly the single best predictor of how long you'll live is your zip code. Your health could be readily apparent from your location and your physical appearance (insta knows what you look like before filters too).

It can give them a huge amount of data concerning your finances as well. The location and info gathered from photos you take of your food and drinks in expensive restaurants or on vacation for example. The person who spends 40 hours a week in a server room is probably making more money than someone who spends 35 hours a week at a McDonalds.

Your location data can be used to show things like how many sexual partners you have, how many friends you have, if you have parents that are still alive, how often you visit the dentist.

If IOS is like Android there will be a lot of sensor data that is freely handed out to any app that is curious without a permission or a prompt. Thinks like if your phone is upright or flat. The magnetic fields around you. etc. All of that data can also be leveraged to learn the most intimate details of you and your life.

When you start thinking about how much you reveal about yourself from nothing but a bunch of seemingly random data points it can really surprise you.

[gorlilla]

And then they'll point out that they promise to aggregate and anonymize the dataset, but i recall the when Netflix said something similar only to latet realize how wrong they actually were.

https://www.wired.com/2007/12/why-anonymous-data-sometimes-i...

(looks like wired has a paywall on okd articles: https://web.archive.org/web/20170921231448/https://www.wired...)

Take note of the date on that article. This was before we really knew much abouy big data in the mainstream, but look how little data it takes to fingerprint an individual.

I remember this as the moment i knew how much trouble we were headed for.