Samsung Just Updated One of Its Phone Apps To Serve Customers Even More Ads (androidpolice.com) 50
An anonymous reader shares a report: Ads are the worst, yet we see them everywhere. They fund the content we consume, for free, on a daily basis. It's one thing to receive ads on a website you are going to for free, but it's quite another when an OEM goes out of its way to force an app onto your phone in order to serve you more ads. Sadly, that is exactly what Samsung just did with its new Samsung Visit In update through the Galaxy Store. On December 15, Samsung in the United States updated a system app called "IPS Geofencing" with the new Samsung Visit In app. This offers and coupons app has been rolling out in other countries and regions over the past year, but just hit the United States. IPS Geofencing was previously unused, or at least it was not user-accessible, and its function was unknown. As part of Visit In, it will be used to track your location, see when you're in a store that sells Samsung products or services, then serve you related ads. While you do need to opt-in for this service, the update allowing the functionality was installed automatically in the background of devices via the Galaxy Store. Further reading: Ads Are Taking Over Samsung's Galaxy Smartphones.
In the US, not in Europe (Score:3)
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Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
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Well let's see:
1) You bought a Samsung phone;
2) You walked into a store that sells Samsung devices;
3) You enabled an app to tell you about special offers based on your location;
4) You got notification of a special offer on Samsung devices when you walked into a Samsung retailer.
Exactly which part of this annoys you? What is the problem? Until you can establish that step three was done without your knowledge, you literally asked Samsung to do this - what's the problem?
From the story:
While you do need to opt-in for this service, the update allowing the functionality was installed automatically in the background of devices via the Galaxy Store.
Samsung installed the app
I've only been happy with my cell phone twice (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: I've only been happy with my cell phone twice (Score:2)
I am currently using a phone with Lineage and without Google. What apps in particular are you finding to be the stumbling points?
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Lineage is still based upon Android, so in that sense you're still using something created by Google, even if it has been defanged/repackaged.
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If you get near a point, make it. This has nothing to do with the GP's complaint.
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Are you implying the phone was a Samsung and thus relevant to this story? Or was the omission deliberate and you were making a broader point?
On the first theory, I can say that I have owned a Galaxy and I did think the hardware was pretty good overall. I wasn't even that annoyed with the software, so I guess I'm in less agreement with you there, but I suspect I strongly agree with you about the international version thing. (Your position isn't clear enough there for me to be sure that I agree with it.) Howe
Fuck Samsung for doing this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Fuck Samsung for doing this. (Score:2)
If it makes you feel any better, Moto is now doing the notification ads too. I turned them off and no longer see any ads, though, because they are ONLY doing notification ads... So far.
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No, Moto gives spammy notifications about the different features of the software you already have installed.
You're using the wrong definition of "ads" for this context. These are commercial ads, not customer service communications.
Re: Fuck Samsung for doing this. (Score:2)
No, they are literally advertising newer phones to me in those notifications, and you don't know what you are talking about.
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My Samsung tablet has recently started harassing me to set up multifactor authentication for my Samsung account, with no way to say "no", and apparently the only acceptable second factor is my mobile phone number.
Not only "no", but "hell no", "fuck you, no" and "the answer is still 'no' if you're the only account left on Earth".
They seem to be massively user-hostile lately, which is unfortunate because their engineering is usually good.
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Seconded. I switched to a Pixel after being sick of the bloatware on my Galaxy S5. The bloatware took up so much space that I had to jailbreak it and delete the bloatware to get Android OS updates! I kept that phone so long it almost became a running joke in the office - at least the guy who had a flip phone got some old-school cred unlike me. Samsung makes great hardware, but awful software. Every single preloaded app on a Samsung device is the worst-in-class. I wonder sometimes if they just find the
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They do this with everything. (Score:3)
I own several Samsung phones, TVs, and monitors. It's the one thing I hate the most about them, their hardware is good.
I also think the TV has back channel to avoid my pfense firewall DNS blacklist as I have extensive ad blocking at the network level and on a computer or a web browser connected via wifi on a phone even never see ads but some how the "smart" TV still gets some (particularly youtube) ... trying to find and block that is on my back burner list of shit to do.
Re: They do this with everything. (Score:2)
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Nice, thanks, this looks promising.
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So this seems like a reasonable candidate for government regulation. It should be illegal for a device to circumvent DNS in the default configuration. The device is basically hacking your network. That's awful.
Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Samsung installs an app. That app requires opt-in. Otherwise it does nothing.
Why are we talking about this again?
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I am still looking, but i can't find "visit in" on the Galaxy Store, so it's not even a case of "Samsung installs an app". This, as they say, appears to be B8.
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I found it on my Note 9 as "Samsung Visit In"
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Exactly!
While you do need to opt-in for this service, the update allowing the functionality was installed automatically in the background of devices via the Galaxy Store.
You literally have to turn this on, opt-in, otherwise it does nothing.
Is the argument "Hey, I turned on a location-based tracking app that serves up special offers based on my location, and now when I am in certain locations I'm getting a bunch of special offers?!
Dear lord, can you not just opt-out of the service you opted-in to?
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That app requires opt-in. Otherwise it does nothing.
Why not install it at opt-in time then? People who don't opt in don't need it on their phone. The fact that Samsung feels arrogant enough to force whatever crap apps they dream up on everybody's phones is already a major issue.
Had the app been part of the stock phone, informed consumers who didn't want it would have had a chance to decide against buying this phone. As is, people who don't want this thing on their phone will need to go through the inconvenience of uninstalling it (that's assuming it even can
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Why not install it at opt-in time then? People who don't opt in don't need it on their phone. The fact that Samsung feels arrogant enough to force whatever crap apps they dream up on everybody's phones is already a major issue.
So your issue is bloatware?
Had the app been part of the stock phone, informed consumers who didn't want it would have had a chance to decide against buying this phone. As is, people who don't want this thing on their phone will need to go through the inconvenience of uninstalling it (that's assuming it even can be uninstalled).
Stop, it's software the buyer has to activate - this is not active until a user makes it active, period.
Moreover, I think it's only a matter of time before a new "update" switches the "opt-in" to "opt-out", and then a later one takes away the "option" part completely - since the app is already on the phone by now. That's the modern way of boiling a frog in ad sauce.
Well thank you for identifying your completely imaginary fears as imaginary, and I appreciate your admission that the software currently opt-in. Unfortunately your bade-up concerns and your own admissions do not take this issue into the realm normal people get upset about.
Samsung put a piece of bloatware on the phone, it is not the end of the world, stop acting like it is.
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So your issue is bloatware?
To my mind "bloatware" is the unnecessary crap on stock phones, but known before the purchase - stuff like Facebook, Bixby or other things I don't use or plan to ever use. I usually check for bloatware when I plan to buy a new phone, and discard phones that have too much - especially it it's not removable. But this is worse - it's bloatware installed on your phone after the purchase, without the user's accord. This is IMO much worse than "regular" bloatware.
Stop, it's software the buyer has to activate - this is not active until a user makes it active, period.
Then unless the buyer doesn't install it explicitl
No more Samsung (Score:1)
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If you're still buying Android phones your vote's wasted. Think about why they exist in the first place.
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You forgot to say anything along with your suggestion that you know about something you found interesting to the topic. Wow, you have some comment to make that you didn't clarify, what useful participation!
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Wow, you have some comment to make that you didn't clarify, what useful participation!
... he said unironically.
Old vs new (Score:1)
Redbox does this (Score:4, Informative)
I posted about this before. On occasion I would get special offer notifications from the Redbox app on my iPhone. After a while I began to detect a pattern - every time I was nearing the store where the redbox was I would get that notification. I checked my app location permissions, and lo and behold the Redbox app had continuous access to my location, even when not using the app. Normally I'm good about locking these permissions down (most apps that actually need location can only get it while I'm using the app, besides a few special cases like mapping apps I use while traveling), but that one slipped through. I had given it access to locate movies in stock near me one day, and accidentally give it continuous access.
Anyway it's ludicrous these companies track your position 24/7 just in order to feed you an advertisement or notification that might, maybe, have a fraction of a percent better effectiveness because of your location. Not nearly worth the privacy risks.
For iPhone, it's easy to peruse through the apps that have location access and quickly lock them down. It's good to do so every now and then (Settings->Privacy->Location Services). Not sure if Android makes that as easy to get a handle on or not.
Re:Redbox does this (Score:5, Interesting)
My adult daughter was severely ill last year and spent a month in the ICU. After about a week of going to the hospital every day I began to receive medical device spam text and calls on my Verizon android phone.
This was not for stuff that was relevant for her condition at all; it was for stuff for old people like me. Clearly this was triggered by location rather than search data. Somebody did a search for old people suddenly going to the hospital frequently. And the thing was I got flooded with robocalls at a time when I really, really had more important things to worry about and really depended on my phone to coordinate my daughter's very complex medical care.
I put a spam blocker on my phone, but it's not just about the inconvenience. It's about the way that your location data leaks and is used to profile you. The privacy implications are staggering.
Ads? (Score:1)
They make apple look good. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be pissed if I just paid $900.00 for a Galaxy S20 and had ads shoved in my face.
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So maybe, if you are smart enough to have a job that enables you to be able to afford a $900 phone, you also grasp the concept of cause and effect - only by "opting-in" do you see ads on your $900 phone, perhaps the wise choice is to not opt-in?
You can't opt-in, then declare yourself a victim of the service you just opted-in to...
Disable Built-in Apps (Score:2)
Completely disabling the built-in apps is the number one reason I've wanted to root my phone. With my more recent Samsung phones, this hasn't always been an option, but I found something almost as good. While you can't disable the apps, even from ADB, there is a trick you can use to get essentially the same thing. Using ADB, instead of disabling the app globally, which doesn't work, you can disable the app for a specific user using the 'disable-user' command. And in almost every case you only care about
Samsung phones are not free (Score:3)
They're devices you pay money for.
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There's a new currency in town: it's you.
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Obviously, but the summary implies you're getting the phone for free.
in order to remain true to my philosophy (Score:2)
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samsung is slow to roll out Android-11 (Score:2)
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What for? The last Android improvement was moving from Lollipop to Marshmallow (allowing apps to write to the external SD card again), and I don't think I've ever even seen an app that requires anything past Lollipop.
So is that why YouTube just cranked up the ads? (Score:3)
Just joking, but I've definitely noticed a major increase in YouTube ads lately.
I'm taking that as a sign of desperation for profit at the google. By extension, perhaps Samsung is hurting for cash? (But I would say that's short-term thinking in this 2020 mess.)
Good. (Score:2)
Good. The more the Android experience sucks the more interest there will be in providing different OS with superior user options.
Samsung psychology is not and can never be Western. While Korean, It's the same as Beijing's psychology of controlling users. It can never see freedom of choice as a goal because that's anathema to Korean thinking. (I enjoyed my time in Korea and like the Korean people but their world is not the narrow world of a few freedom-loving Richard Stallmans and is highly conformist.)
Freed
Sometimes ads are really really really silly (Score:2)
Allow me to prove it: I have Amazon Prime for a very long time and I've accassionally watched prime videos. I got an ad pretty much between every episode, EVEN though I'm a paid subscriber. But you know what that ad is about? It's about Amazon Prime.