Sunday, February 16, 2014

Am I a spy?

In a recent blog post, Scott Hanselman denounces "Adware, Malware, Spyware, Crapware" as pure evil. I totally agreed with him, or so I thought.

Recently, I updated one of my apps, and one of the reviewers said that the app now contained SPYWARE. Hmm, since I don't think I'm writing spware, maybe the issue isn't so black and white.

I can go into the my specific details, but I'll discuss a more well known example.

Google Now is an Android App that delivers personalized 'cards'. The cards give me information on the local weather near me, websites (that I read) that that have new blog posts, the latest sports scores of my favorite teams, and they even used to show how many steps I walked in the recent past.

Google Now was creating this content by reading my email, tracking my browsing history, and more or less spying on my life. The app is doing things that I don't know about and that I may or may not want. I think it's fair to say that Google Now is a type of spyware; yet, I think Google Now is a pretty great app.

Name-calling seems to always trivialize things, so I shouldn't get too hung up on whether someone calls me a spy or not. Even if they do, maybe it's not so bad.

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