Develop Bugs

[General] How do you people value your own information?

I'm asking this because after the Sony/SOE hacking (which I am somewhat affected by), it's got me thinking.
There are some online services that I've been trying to remove myself form (since before that happened), and companies make it virtually impossible in some cases to get themselves removed from these services.
The biggest example is Facebook. It's literally impossible to remove yourself from facebook. It gives you no decent way to see a list of Pages you have "Liked" and there is no way to remove all of your posts from the site.
Twitter makes this easy... Foursquare makes this easy. Loopt makes this easy...
But it seems companies that are big into Advertising make it as hard as possible for you to decouple yourself form them.
Slacker and Pandora have no such option to remove yourself from those sites after you create your account (and it's impossible to purge your personal information from them unless yo go through hoops and bounds to do so). Contrarily, Last.FM makes it as easy as a button click and some confirmations.
Yahoo! and Google make it easy to delete accounts, but Windows Live basically leaves the account sitting there for something like 4-6 months before it's deleted...
Provided there are decent confirmations, I think any online services should allow any user who willingly signed up for it to willingly walk away from it, and take their personal data and information with them. It seems like a huge power grab by the industry to lock users into them and own our information...
I've already written my Congressman and Senator following an issue with AOL where it took literally weeks of constant phones calls for them to delete my old accounts that I haven't used in forever. Finally they agreed to "waive" the "we don't delete accounts" rule because I was in the military for years following the account creation and they had it on record since I canceled my AOL service that I was doing so because I was being deployed back then...
What do people think. Do you think it's cool that companies expect to own our information after we sign up for their services and make it extremely difficult if not outright impossible to decouple ourselves from them?
Or do you want to be denied a job (or admissions into a university) because you posted something tasteless or inflamatory on facebook one night? (yes, universitiy admissions are starting to check social networks)?
For the past 3 months or so I've been trying to close down all these unneeded services that I have subscribed to in the past, and have been met with several brick walls.
It's even impossible to delete accounts on forums these days, which is uber laughable as well...
I'm thinking about quitting facebook, but getting all my stuff off of there is looking like an impossible task...
EDIT: Pandora finally got around to deleting my account... But I did send them like 5 emails today before they got around to it at 10:50 PM (first contacted them like 2 months ago).

I agree with you that all services you willingly sign up for should be as easy to leave as they were to join, it makes sense.
I'm on Facebook, several tech forums, I use several cloud based services (mail etc.) and I try not to post too many things that would make me look bad.
Facebook has by far been the most problematic to get off, you can deactivate your account but not really remove it.
/J

that's a funny question. It's not ha ha funny but it's funny to jump through those hoops. As far as information shared, on social networking, I know its vitally important to keep professionalism especially in clinical psychology. Personally, if my posts aren't related to tech or anime, I don't post it on social networking. I call a person, I write an angry email or something, but rarely do I kvetch on a social networking platform. Because it's a bad idea...
I mean I have opened a second fb account and surprisingly my first FB is still open. It doesn't bother me because it is "dead" for all intents and purposes. Honestly I just really don't mind it personally, but again that's just me. I'm not the type to post inflammatory material. I guess its different strokes.
However, I do agree, it should be easy to delete your own account. But I have to correct you on yahoo specifically. You can recover the account if its deleted. It's rather easy and I've done it multiple times. I think after a year (for yahoo specifically) then its gone. But otherwise, nope it's still there.

Yahoo! gave me an instant way to delete my account hte last time I did it. It was instant, with no recovery. I checked immediately afterwards when I did it and there was no way to recover the account. Perhaps that is a new development.
Both Yahoo! and Google allow you instant account deletion (or did, IRT the former). Microsoft keeps the accounts for something like 120 days (used to be 45, then 60, etc.) and AOL seemingly keeps them forever because the account I had to go through the run-around to delete hadn't been used for years (almost a decade), but had a ton of personal information on it that I couldn't change because I didn't remember an old secret answer so I couldn't even log in to get it off there (I used to have AOL internet access).
I went back and deleted almost all of my posts on Facebook. It took over 6 hours because you have to personally track down every comment you've made on the site (including those on walls of people no longer on your friend's list). This is intentionally convoluded compared to Twitter, where all of your tweets and retweets are there in a list and it took like 5 minutes to delete them...

As much as I despise Facebook's practice of making accounts hard to delete I've been wondering for a while if it is a result of a fragile database structure they are using. N8ter 's description of having to manually remove comments all over the place makes me wonder if Facebook's database structure has some sort of vulnerability to having data scattered in so many places removed.
Granted, it's prolly more likely they make it difficult because they can.

What do you mean, "you people"?

Nice one
Suppose I.walked right into that
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

So... let me get this straight,
You signed on to privately owned websites, handed over private information/made incriminating posts (in any capacity)... and now you're complaining about it?
In boardroom meetings in those companies, people like you are punchlines.
Nothing on the internet is private. Let me repeat that; nothing on the internet is private.
Learn it, know it, love it.

I think your missing the point.
Facebook makes it almost impossible for people to leave after they've used the service a lot. You have to track down every comment and wall post and delete them one by one, among other things before they will delete your account.
Blacker flat out refuses to delete accounts even after several emails. They don't consider email private information... ... ...
Other services just make it impossible. Google voice makes it impossible ti remove the service or your phone number. Aol generally flat out refuses to delete accounts. Windows live wants your info to stay there for six months.
Its not about it not being private, its about me not having a choice in whether or not my personal info sits on their server.
Having a ton of extra accounts increases spam email, among other things...
Hope that cleared up my stance a bit...
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

N8ter said:
The biggest example is Facebook. It's literally impossible to remove yourself from facebook. It gives you no decent way to see a list of Pages you have "Liked"
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I thought you could see those pages in "Download Your Information"
http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18830

N8ter said:
I think your missing the point.
Facebook makes it almost impossible for people to leave after they've used the service a lot. You have to track down every comment and wall post and delete them one by one, among other things before they will delete your account.
Blacker flat out refuses to delete accounts even after several emails. They don't consider email private information... ... ...
Other services just make it impossible. Google voice makes it impossible ti remove the service or your phone number. Aol generally flat out refuses to delete accounts. Windows live wants your info to stay there for six months.
Its not about it not being private, its about me not having a choice in whether or not my personal info sits on their server.
Having a ton of extra accounts increases spam email, among other things...
Hope that cleared up my stance a bit...
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App
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honestly, I know what you mean. Its very annoying and frustrating. But just take it all as a lesson that these are all private companies. Neither you or I have any right to an expectation of privacy. Its a hard truth to face. My Facebook profile is as dry as a bone. I never post or submit any info I wouldn't be comfortable with the whole world knowing.
Until there is a government-run social networking platform, just understand that.

Tone_ said:
I thought you could see those pages in "Download Your Information"
http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18830
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No. That's only to download your pictures, videos, and stuff like that if you want a hard copy or to put it on another social network/profile.
For example, if you want to put all your facebook stuff on your Windows Live Profile, but they don't exist on your computer/smartphone anymore...
Also, that won't remove the ridiculous amount of manual labor involved in tracking down every comment/wall post and deleting them one by one...
All that information is trivially seen by clicking on "Profile" at the Facebook homepage. It shows all your activity. But you should be able to remove it by clicking on the X. Right now, you have to go to every page, track that comment down (sometimes in a sea of 1k+ comments), and manually delete it. Some of those comment feeds are so damn large, that they can crash some users' browsers or slow them to a crawl.

The Judgement day never came, but Mango event will indeed come!

Really, superreally, i mean megabyte x 10^60 really, the mango event will be held on May 24th! Anyone excited to see?
The one thing i would love to see is to have facebook intergrated to be useful, like getting notifications if someone replied it back to my fb posts by using people's hub. Cause when i use fb for commenting & stuff, i have to manually search them to see if i ever got replies and even if someone replied it back, and i go to actual facbook.com, it won't give me notifications that the person replied me back. (that is when i used fb through people hub.)
What do you want to see in the next big update?

I want option to save camera setting.. way to freeze my phone from changing into landscape mode when i dont want it..

I just want multi tasking, and more APIs. I am sick and tired of havting to re-load apps just because my phone whent to sleep, or I checked an e-mail.

Turn by Turn Navigation, it's the only reason I haven't left Android yet. (And i mean Bing Maps TbTN, not some random third party app that gets removes from the marketplace)

Exchange sync'ed Tasks. I love the phone, but not having Tasks and the inability to dial directly from within a Task is a daily major pain for me.

HamerPlyr said:
Exchange sync'ed Tasks. I love the phone, but not having Tasks and the inability to dial directly from within a Task is a daily major pain for me.
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Try Tasks Anywhere or My Tasks. They both let you dial and launch url's from within the app. No exchange sync yet though. And I believe there is a few or at least one that has the feature of exchange sync. But, they may not have the linking feature.

Mango messaging... the downside

The mango messaging system seems nice and all, but I really wonder why they did not keep it seperated.
I had my doubts and than I read this article http://wmpoweruser.com/mango-and-messaging-we-have-a-problem/ which sums up some more issues.
Basically my biggest problem is that we send more important stuff trough SMS it has a much higher value than an IM. So whenever somebody smsses an adress, i will need to scroll trough 100s of IMs which I can not clear since the address is still there in one of those messages.
Second: the media are different, you can not expect the other user to switch to FB chat to MSN than to sms because I want to change service, this still incorporate 3 different media for the majority of the users namely a WL desktop client, facebook webpage and a phone for regular texting (which also costs money so people will use it differently)
Third, we used msn when we were 12, now nobody uses it in my country but I would like to use FB chat... This is not possible, you can only switch off FB chat or switch off both. So the whole feature will be useless if I dont want to use msn/windows live messenger.
Notifications: what if smsses are inportant but IMs not, hopefully I will be able to receive a toast ONLY with sms messages and just let the IMs slide. Imagine receiving 100 messages every 10 minutes it will drive you nuts. And here comes the next problem when there is an important sms inbetween you dont know who send it, because if you open up messages they all look the same so you dont know who texted you (important) or has send you and im (which has less priority).
I wish they can make a new tab for the im conversations or atleast filter the thread down on ALL / SMS / IM. As it is now, it will be nice for kids but if you are 16+ it will become a major pain to find what is important and what is just spam.
The system right now is shortsighted and of poor value. an implementation like blackberry's is better. SMS is a different system, mail is a different system, IM is as well, you all respond differently on each one of them. It should be possible to mannage each seperately. Now ill have to be always offline and rely on third party just to im trough FB which kills the use of this native feature, but SMS messages are just to important to blend with the IMs.

This is all speculation to be fair, they have beta testers so if there are issues with notifications they will probably be aware of these. I'm happy to use a separate messaging client and keep my messaging hub for sms only as long as WLM is allowed again in IM+ and others. That would just make things easy.
On a side note people should stop complaining that nobody uses WLM, enough with that, it's the most used IM client in the world!
I'm not 12 andstill this is my number one choice for IM as I barely use my facebook account and it has integrated facebook chat anyway.

fair (and while I wrote the article)
one major issue with being in a beta of anything is that it takes time for testing and that's huge. I mean looking at Adam Lein and others, the sms interface was a bit bare and naked - save from the actual threaded view.
In nodo, we have seen the issue of some lag in the SMS window (not nearly as bad as windows mobile, but still very noticeable) and there needs to be some richer options for recall, optimization and trash collection.
I love the idea for having a central messaging hub that integrates the services I use most (microsoft specifically). I still use MSN and it's my favorite messaging tool (I used yahoo early in college, and AIM in high school) so I use MSN a lot.
The notification I don't feel is a huge issue (as Eldar contends). There are far more bigger problems with the SMS view from a variety of different contexts. All in all, there may be a big problem. I doubt it will be solved till Apollo but that is definitely a worse case scenario.
I mean yes, the sms lag is better in nodo, but not by much

One thing to note, if you dont want to use WLM or Facebook chat just change the method of communication to SMS. There is absolutely nothing forcing you to send IM's if YOU dont want to, its only there as a convenience to WP7 users so you can continue your conversation across the different mediums seamlessly. Just because someone is online on Facebook chat or WLM doesnt mean you cant just send an SMS if that is your preference.

efjay said:
One thing to note, if you dont want to use WLM or Facebook chat just change the method of communication to SMS. There is absolutely nothing forcing you to send IM's if YOU dont want to, its only there as a convenience to WP7 users so you can continue your conversation across the different mediums seamlessly. Just because someone is online on Facebook chat or WLM doesnt mean you cant just send an SMS if that is your preference.
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I know. Thats not the problem. But it will render the built in IM useless if disabled.
The problem is the communication trough SMS is totally different than the communication trough IM. Which will occur on different devices still for the majority out there. An SMS to me is still a high priority thing in some cases, if you want to make an appointment it works fine trough sms, however if its cluttered with all IM's from other users and stuff Im afraid one can easily get lost in the received messages and not find the IM of the appointment when looking for it or trying to find it again after you have read it.
Having IMs seperated (which are in general sended way more frequently with less important stuff than SMS) would be better because now the user can decide to use the built in IM and keep it seperated from the SMS OR mix them in a thread if he/she desires. But one will still have the advantage of starting an IM out of the people hub.
Also I know you dont have to use it, I've seen all the demo's and read about it. But the thing is what if I want to use it but just Facebook and what if I still want to see my SMS messages seperated. Using just FB chat is not possible atm, it will also pull up your WLM contacts, it would be totally cool if I could set MSN status as offline and FB status as online, but as it looks right now its only possible the other way around...
To explain the problem in more detail
Picture this: you have the device in your pocket, its fine if people want to contact me trough Facebook, but if somebody sends me an SMS with the appointmet and half an hour later starts talking to me on FB chat (because he/she is on FB than), I check my phone and the SMS with the appointment has sunk all the way down since there have been 10 new IM's from this person.
Its easy to lose/forget the valuable information if you can not check your phone every minute.
Dont get me wrong, its a feature with great potential but as of now, it will need more control over the different services (individual statusses per service) and some way to filter out the SMS messages and hide the IM or vica versa.
This feature will benefit a lot more when it would also be possible for whatapp to be integrated, which resembles the SMS a lot better than IM.

Maybe Microsoft could add a filter option? For example, when the SMS filter is toggled it would only show text messages as well send only text messages .

@Marvin_S: You could come across the same situation if you get a lot of SMS's as well, same as with email. I see your point but making them separate just makes it messier, having to switch back and forth to send messages and having to determine where a new message is. If you start adding separate notifications for each protocol then it becomes even more complex to implement and manage.
Much easier to have all the messages on one screen and you can easily just scroll to find what you want and not have to try and figure out by which method the message was delivered.

SMS isn't just for important conversations. There is a reason why people run through thousands of SMS in a month nowadays, and its not because they are really important. Its because people use SMS the same way they use IM, to chat.
If you are getting something really important in an SMS (like an appointment), it might make sense to copy it over into a task or your calendar.

nice work !http://media.xda-developers.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

Why would it make anything messier? It should be optional ofcourse, so it will only help those who will need to keep it organised.
Well SMS and IM are very different. That some of us use it the same way is a choice of course, just like some people chose to use it as different media to communicate.
You can NOT receive IM's if you dont want to receive it (OFFLINE) and the other party will not be able to send you one, while with SMS it will be sent whenever somebody desires and will be read whenever the reader has the time (always delivered --> higher priority/value).
This for me is a fundamental difference and makes SMS more reliable for appointments or letting somebody know where you are on the go.
And I just wondered why MS chose to do it this way, while all the other platforms have these forms of communication seperated.
I can see this having a good and a bad side, maybe I worry too much about the negative aspect, but it can be solved easily by providing us with some more settings to have more control over how we want to receive our IM's and Texts.
Like sheltem said a switch or a pivot with All/IM/Text will make it simple for the user to narrow its search down. And maybe defaulting it to All (like email, All/unread/flag) and having the same interface to delete IM's and texts will be great.
I have faith MS will come up with a solution which will satisfy both parties and I have full faith that they will...

thank god I didn't have to reiterate my position ad nauseum
I've been doing that since the article has been written and while I don't mind spirited debate of how windows phone is versus how it could be, it's like many users sorta either focused on Eldar's contentions, the notification, or the sms window and not the total sums of each argument.
As I said before, for us, geeks, there may not be much of an issue. But consider who/what microsoft is trying to target - everyone else. Place yourself in their shoes, and of course it can lead to some frustration and some easy mistakes from users thinking hey I sent it this way when in fact it came in another way - EVEN WITH THE TEXT/FACEBOOK option open.
I don't think there is anything wrong with an extra swipe gesture to switch mode of communication. It is almost the same thing microsoft is doing, but instead of it being in the menu setting, it is in the face of the user. And sometimes, that makes all of the difference.
I'm not knocking the idea or the service, but asking everyone to consider how people without windows phone may view it. And that empathy is important for Microsoft to make it a success. So it's not a knock at Microsoft or their intentions.

domineus said:
thank god I didn't have to reiterate my position ad nauseum
I've been doing that since the article has been written and while I don't mind spirited debate of how windows phone is versus how it could be, it's like many users sorta either focused on Eldar's contentions, the notification, or the sms window and not the total sums of each argument.
As I said before, for us, geeks, there may not be much of an issue. But consider who/what microsoft is trying to target - everyone else. Place yourself in their shoes, and of course it can lead to some frustration and some easy mistakes from users thinking hey I sent it this way when in fact it came in another way - EVEN WITH THE TEXT/FACEBOOK option open.
I don't think there is anything wrong with an extra swipe gesture to switch mode of communication. It is almost the same thing microsoft is doing, but instead of it being in the menu setting, it is in the face of the user. And sometimes, that makes all of the difference.
I'm not knocking the idea or the service, but asking everyone to consider how people without windows phone may view it. And that empathy is important for Microsoft to make it a success. So it's not a knock at Microsoft or their intentions.
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Exactly... this is how the a standard user will use it:
Im running late, hurrying to get to the station on time. Ill text my friends "hey Im on my way to the station" but he left his computer on with his FB account and the message will get send to his FB account because I forget to switch to SMS mode... I think I sended the message just fine, but sended it trough FB instead of text. Of course there is this status text saying FB, but still.
It might sound really stupid and exaggerated, but I can assure you this will happen and it will be annoying to constantly switch back to SMS if you do really have to SMS. Having a seperate click in the people hub for sent IM, sent SMS, or a pivot in the messaging hub will totally rule out these errors.
But this is ofcourse the downside... and hopefully they come up with something smart and think a bit outside of the box. The system has great potential, no doubt.

Marvin_S said:
Exactly... this is how the a standard user will use it:
Im running late, hurrying to get to the station on time. Ill text my friends "hey Im on my way to the station" but he left his computer on with his FB account and the message will get send to his FB account because I forget to switch to SMS mode... I think I sended the message just fine, but sended it trough FB instead of text. Of course there is this status text saying FB, but still.
It might sound really stupid and exaggerated, but I can assure you this will happen and it will be annoying to constantly switch back to SMS if you do really have to SMS. Having a seperate click in the people hub for sent IM, sent SMS, or a pivot in the messaging hub will totally rule out these errors.
But this is ofcourse the downside... and hopefully they come up with something smart and think a bit outside of the box. The system has great potential, no doubt.
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I know personally even though it says the service in a tiny font, I'll cry foul because of user error. Microsoft's main goal is to sorta cease some consensual user error not increase it. There are a variety of ideas to kick around
One comment noted a notification system in the messaging hub that indicates where the user messaged you at (like the notifications portion of the people hub) in conjunction with the swipe/pivot gestures to make a fairly good solution of which service the notification is coming from and keeping it organized.
Adding to that paradigm, I can still see how the initial chat window serves a function, as a unified way the person contacted you recently. And I have to be honest, that would be really a great and refined method of implementing a submessaging system full of notification and a clean user experience.
But to ask
does a swipe really complicate the user more than a tap setting>mode>switch service to (sms/facebook/msn)
I'm sorry, I don't see how a pivot is less complex than the system that is in mango already. replacing the finger taps for one or two pivots...
imho should've posted this write up on xda

Well the thing is MS has its vision of having everything related into a horzontal scrolling panorama. Which is absolutely great.
And they want you to use the settings menu as less as possible, so in this case yeah this switch setting (which I will be using frequently) will be more annoying since its click select close than type. While the pivot swiping to the right will get you into sms directly and the user will always stay in the same "level" or layer.
And it follows the consistency of the system this way.
You will have all the options with 1 just one pivot menu:
All (which is the way it works right now) / SMS / IM / Online
if you are on all, its the threaded view with default reply option as it is now. When swipe to the right it filters the messages down to sms only with reply as SMS.
Im the same but than reply as IM.

actally that too is a good point
Microsoft has made a unified design experience focusing on pivots and wipes with metro. The idea of tapping through settings is sadly reminescent of apple and android; somethign I don't really want to go back to anytime soon

Marvin_S said:
Exactly... this is how the a standard user will use it:
Im running late, hurrying to get to the station on time. Ill text my friends "hey Im on my way to the station" but he left his computer on with his FB account and the message will get send to his FB account because I forget to switch to SMS mode... I think I sended the message just fine, but sended it trough FB instead of text. Of course there is this status text saying FB, but still.
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I agree that there is the potential for a problem here. Ideally, the facebook connection would be detected as idle and the OS would choose the fallback method of SMS. I haven't used it so I can't say for sure how it handles this, I'd hope it is that good. Of course, that still leaves us with the potential for problems in the window that it takes for the user to go from online to idle/away. Not nearly as big of an issue though.
It all comes down to how accurately the software can determine a user's presence. If the OS automatically sends a message via Facebook because it knows the user is actively using Facebook then I don't think there is an issue.

Personally I think ms should just separate the all and using the metro theme, sperste elm, fb chat and SMS. So you just slide. I don't use wlm, and hardly use hotmail there spam filter is awful.
Sent from my 7 Mozart T8698 using XDA Windows Phone 7 App

Actually, hotmaii filters out spam just fine for me. Quite well, actually.
On topic. I think we should wait and see how this works in its entirety. I don't think it's going to be as big of an issue as you guys think it may be.
And, separating the services defeats the purpose of the threaded convo view in the first place.

PG2G said:
SMS isn't just for important conversations. There is a reason why people run through thousands of SMS in a month nowadays, and its not because they are really important. Its because people use SMS the same way they use IM, to chat.
If you are getting something really important in an SMS (like an appointment), it might make sense to copy it over into a task or your calendar.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This.
Seriously. If you got something important to note you probably should learn to write it down or train your working memory to recall the info instead of relying so much on technology.

Marvin_S said:
Exactly... this is how the a standard user will use it:
Im running late, hurrying to get to the station on time. Ill text my friends "hey Im on my way to the station" but he left his computer on with his FB account and the message will get send to his FB account because I forget to switch to SMS mode... I think I sended the message just fine, but sended it trough FB instead of text. Of course there is this status text saying FB, but still.
It might sound really stupid and exaggerated, but I can assure you this will happen and it will be annoying to constantly switch back to SMS if you do really have to SMS. Having a seperate click in the people hub for sent IM, sent SMS, or a pivot in the messaging hub will totally rule out these errors.
But this is ofcourse the downside... and hopefully they come up with something smart and think a bit outside of the box. The system has great potential, no doubt.
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Click to collapse
Hmm, interesting my reasonable response and the response of others would be to hit the line of communication the person would check the most which arguably is a person's self phone.
Too each his own for sure, but I don't think it's out of the norm or rather is the norm that people would message someone on their phone first, especially if going somewhere to meet someone.

Facebook keeping tabs on calls and sms via FB app? (Creepy!)

For a while now I've been weirded out with some of Facebook's friend suggestions that pop up on the right (desktop), because it's putting customers of mine up there that I have never corresponded with via FB or email, basically only by phone or text. And the timing was always crazy because I would work at their house or talk to them on the phone and the next day they would come up as a suggestion. Well last night I spoke with an old colleague of mine on the phone that I haven't spoken to in about a year and today I go to my profile and sure enough, he's at the very top of my friends list. I have come to the conclusion that the FB app on our phones MUST be keeping tabs of who we are talking to and making the suggestions based on that information, and god knows what else they are doing with that info. How else can this be explained? It is the only explanation that I can think of. Checking the permissions of the app, it DOES have the ability to check pretty much everything we do on our phones.
Has anybody else noticed anything like this going on?

I'm only surprised that you're surprised. I assumed this was true without even using the app.

I guess I'm not surprised but I didn't think they dug that deep into our privacy. Nowhere is it disclosed that they use that information for anything, and when I google it I find people posting about similar findings as me but never anything official from Facebook.

Permissions Denied can block most of those! It still bugs me that GPS can't be blocked without crashing the app, though (even if you've turned off posting with location).
PDroid seems to be a good option for those with Cyanogen, but it's not available for my E4GT. Anybody have a moment to put together a PDroid patch for Calkulin's ROM?

Thank you for that, pinandstutter! I use AdBlock, NoScript and Peerblock on my PC for these exact reasons. I didn't know something like this was available for my phone.

Quite frankly FB is a sack of scuzzbags.

Ads in the Samsung Calendar?!

I just had a calendar notification pop up that said "iPhoneX is Here!"
I clicked on it and it opened my calendar and sure enough there's this entry that I never made, and it repeats daily for the next 5 days.
I'm guessing this is a third party app and not Samsung. But I've checked permissions and none of my 3rd party apps have calendar permissions.
The only thing different that I installed from my previous phone is Blurams app for a security camera we purchased and Network Signal Info app.
Anyone know of anyway to figure out which app is pushing notifications to my calendar?

Gmail sometimes automatically adds things to your calendar from emails that you receive if they include a meeting invitation attachment. Check for a matching email in your gmail inbox/trash/spam

umaro said:
Gmail sometimes automatically adds things to your calendar from emails that you receive if they include a meeting invitation attachment. Check for a matching email in your gmail inbox/trash/spam
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Click to collapse
Good call, but nothing there. Just checked spam and trash.

I just got the exact same message and was wondering that too. I used to have a problem with my iCloud calendar on my iPhone x where people could just put random events on my iCloud calendar and they would appear and now it seems they can do the same thing with a Samsung calendar

Mr. Orange 645 said:
I just had a calendar notification pop up that said "iPhoneX is Here!"
I clicked on it and it opened my calendar and sure enough there's this entry that I never made, and it repeats daily for the next 5 days.
I'm guessing this is a third party app and not Samsung. But I've checked permissions and none of my 3rd party apps have calendar permissions.
The only thing different that I installed from my previous phone is Blurams app for a security camera we purchased and Network Signal Info app.
Anyone know of anyway to figure out which app is pushing notifications to my calendar?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Which calendar this message from? My calendar or google calendar?

I've been getting them too

torickray said:
Which calendar this message from? My calendar or google calendar?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The stock Samsung Calendar app.

I would flip if I had iphone advertising on my Samsung phone, seriously, but I don't see any advertising on mine, maybe because I went over all the menus and disabled all advertising, tracking etc. . Those are usually in privacy settings, or similar. If that doesn't work try to guess which programs could be doing this and limit all the permissions for them. Also you could create some throw away gmail account to register the phone, that nobody knows and you rarely get any emails.

That's not advertising from the app. Common sense would tell you that Samsung would not advertise for an iPhone.
There is a way that people can add events to your calendar without your permission simply by knowing your email address.
It is indeed coming from your Google account.
To prevent this you need to turn off the ability to accept events without confirmation or permission.
Here is a good resource.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/23/20829615/google-calendar-spam-events-sharing-email-how-to-stop

Mr. Orange 645 said:
The stock Samsung Calendar app.
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Click to collapse
Yes. But what calendar it link too? Did you connect to google calendar and the message is come from google calendar?

This sounds like a spam calendar event. I just had the same issue, but mine were all in Russian. If it is, where it comes from is if someone adds your email as an invitee, it will add to your calendar even without getting the email or replying. The setting that allows this has to be fixed on a PC web version of Google calendar.
Here is how to do that, but it doesn't deal with the events already there I think.
https://howtoremove.guide/remove-spam-in-google-calendar/
To mark an event as spam, I can not recall the exact steps, but it was something like in Google calendar on the phone, open the event without clicking any links. Hit the 3 vertical dots in the upper right. One of the options should be "mark as spam" or something like that. Or there might be "more actions" then the mark as spam option.
I can not find the original website where I learned that. But it fixed my problem since it blocked the spammer. There does not appear to be the same functionality in Samsung calendar, so try doing on the website version from a computer.

torickray said:
Which calendar this message from? My calendar or google calendar?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
torickray said:
Yes. But what calendar it link too? Did you connect to google calendar and the message is come from google calendar?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Gotcha, sorry. Yes, it shows it came from my Gmail address (Google Calendar), but it's greyed out. And. You can't edit the entry, either. Just delete it.

DeeXii said:
That's not advertising from the app. Common sense would tell you that Samsung would not advertise for an iPhone.
There is a way that people can add events to your calendar without your permission simply by knowing your email address.
It is indeed coming from your Google account.
To prevent this you need to turn off the ability to accept events without confirmation or permission.
Here is a good resource.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/23/20829615/google-calendar-spam-events-sharing-email-how-to-stop
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Common sense would tell you that I already stated I didn't believe it was coming from Samsung. Instated that in the very first post.
Thank you for the link, I'll turn that setting off.
My concern now is it isn't just me, it's others here. Somewhere along the line, someone has got a hold of our email addresses.

Mr. Orange 645 said:
Common sense would tell you that I already stated I didn't believe it was coming from Samsung. Instated that in the very first post.
Thank you for the link, I'll turn that setting off.
My concern now is it isn't just me, it's others here. Somewhere along the line, someone has got a hold of our email addresses.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry if that came off rude I did not intend for it too. It just seemed like the discussion was going on a route that made it seem like it was the Samsung app rather than a Google calendar issue.
Well, truth be told I got one of these two days ago. The same exact one.
There are tons of breaches that have been happening in recent years. You can use https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to see if your email address was included in a breach. (This does not contain all recent breaches but it has a lot)
I also have noticed a crazy uptick in back to back to back robot scam calls. The other day (same day I got the calendar spam) I was at work and a client of mine and a customer of his all had our phones ring at the same exact time. They were all "Scam likely". While they were different incoming phone numbers it was literally at the same exact time. Things seem to have really kicked up a notch when it comes to spam. At least it seems so.

DeeXii said:
Sorry if that came off rude I did not intend for it too. It just seemed like the discussion was going on a route that made it seem like it was the Samsung app rather than a Google calendar issue.
Well, truth be told I got one of these two days ago. The same exact one.
There are tons of breaches that have been happening in recent years. You can use https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to see if your email address was included in a breach. (This does not contain all recent breaches but it has a lot)
I also have noticed a crazy uptick in back to back to back robot scam calls. The other day (same day I got the calendar spam) I was at work and a client of mine and a customer of his all had our phones ring at the same exact time. They were all "Scam likely". While they were different incoming phone numbers it was literally at the same exact time. Things seem to have really kicked up a notch when it comes to spam. At least it seems so.
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Click to collapse
Yeah I actually checked that site about a week or two ago. Was taking some training on internet sources in criminal investigations, and they showed us that site. My email address has been compromised like 14 times, LOL.
And YES to the robocalls!! I usually just hang up on them without answering. But the other day, as soon as I hit decline, it rang again. I mean IMMEDIATELY. Did it three or four times. That's a new tactic.
It seems like every time they say the cell carriers are cracking down on robocalls, they just increase. I can't even answer my ****ing phone anymore.

Thanks for the link to this thread. Yes I saw this in Samsung calendar this morning too. I have never seen anything like this in Google calendar and I don't have any spam emails that would trigger this.

Ive never seen this on any note phone I've had and dont see it now. Currently using just the stock Sammy calendar.
Ive had a few emails breached over time and that link above that tells you if your email addy has been comprised is a good resource. That said, even with a couple of my email addys breached ive still not seen this...

Just had the same thing. Never saw any spam emails with calendar invites, though. There were 4 events per day over 8 days.

It's a know issue with Gmail. Or "working as intended", really..
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/23/20829615/google-calendar-spam-events-sharing-email-how-to-stop

It's so weird that it suddenly hit us Note10/+ users. Maybe a coincidence, but still strange. And yup, sounds like a spam email event. Spammers/scammers are useless wastes of air. ?