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MIT researchers have found that much of the data transferred to and from the 500 most popular free applications for Google Android cellphones make little or no difference to the user's experience.
Of those "covert" communications, roughly half appear to be initiated by standard Android analytics packages, which report statistics on usage patterns and program performance and are intended to help developers improve applications.
"The interesting part is that the other 50 percent cannot be attributed to analytics," says Julia Rubin, a postdoc in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who led the new study. "There might be a very good reason for this covert communication. We are not trying to say that it has to be eliminated. We're just saying the user needs to be informed."
The original paper [PDF] came via MIT.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 20 2015, @04:58AM
>Of those "covert" communications, roughly half appear to be initiated by standard Android analytics packages, which report statistics on usage patterns and program performance and are intended to help developers improve applications.
So, in other words, this data is being used to inform the UX designers and (presumably) improve future versions of the apps, and more likely the design of other apps in the future.
Not saying I want to spend my 4G metered data helping future generations of UX designers, but monitoring what users are actually doing with apps is one of the best ways to figure out how to improve them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 20 2015, @05:13AM
IMO it is a necessary evil. The vast majority of users will not make constructive comments to improve the software; in the extreme case they will just say "this shit doesn't work" and never use it again. With UX logging, you can track when users have aborted an unsuccessful process, what the network circumstances were at that time etc.
But I still would like to be able to opt-out of this type of traffic.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 20 2015, @07:43AM
Evil is not necessary.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 20 2015, @06:08AM
"but monitoring what users are actually doing with apps is one of the best ways to figure out how to improve them."
Markus agrees with you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Wolf [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 20 2015, @01:42PM
If somebody cares enough to snoop in my personal life (to the extent of how I select menu items in my phone app), I must be far more important than I think I am.
Put another way: what a colossal waste of time this is, unless I'm pissing off somebody with tremendously more resources than I have, and if that's the case - they have much more efficient ways of making my life a living hell.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2015, @09:22PM
The "if you aren't doing anything wrong" argument is still getting quite a workout I see.