Nothing Is For Free, There's Always a Price To Pay
A few days ago I finally took some steps towards my long procrastinated plan and started looking for an app. At the beginning of the covid-19 lockdown I decided to work on my English vocabulary. That was an old plan of mine but life is always like a rush, there's not time for everything and my plan got postponed all the time.
Silly me, I thought during the lockdown I would have plenty of time for everything. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong as that was the busiest period for me. I had to care for my family and I was the one who could go out shopping and running errands, so there wasn't much time left for learning. Plus I picked up sewing, which took up all my free time.
As I said in the beginning of my post, a few days I go I went to Play Store, looking for a vocabulary app. I prefer printed, paper books more but as I'm traveling quite a lot during summer, an android app is way more comfortable for me, than carrying a book.
There were hundreds of apps in the app store and I had no idea which one to choose, so I thought I'd use my good old trick, look for the one with the highest download number and rating. Then I downloaded the first one I thought it fits my requirements and opened.
I know there are a bunch of things you have to agree, allow the app to access a few things on my phone, but wasn't expecting what happened. Remember, this is a language app, which helps you learn words, nothing more.
The first thing the app asked me to allow was access to my photo and media files. 😲 Why on earth want this app access to my media and photo files? I'm not an expert but I know a few things and the only reason why they want that is to know what kind of adds to serve me, that's what I think. Obviously I said NO, denied access and I wasn't allowed to use the app. I was told the only way to use the app is by granting access to my photo and media file. Having no other choice I hit the Uninstall button and looked for another app.
The next app I downloaded, surprisingly didn't ask my permission to access anything on my phone 😲 I was able to use the app without any problems.
This case made me think of what we are paying for some things, for being able to use an app for free and for many other things. How many times a day we get different pop-up messages on our screen, asking us to allow, deny, agree, not agree, this and that. I bet many people don't even read the message, just automatically press the highlighted option to be able to get on with whatever they are doing.
Then we read in the news that app and device developers are listening to our conversations under the pretext of trying to understand our behavior for future development. Nice try!
The next day I wanted to check the meaning of a certain Arabic word I keep hearing in movies. I knew the meaning more or less but wanted to be sure, so I used Google Translate. It was one word, not more.
After checking the word, I wanted to check my Twitter feed and surprise, surprise! I got two Arabic adverts in five minutes. I speak four languages but Arabic is not one of them, also have no interest in learning it either. Now you can throw stones at me but if I don't understand the language, I don't need to see the ads either, right? Good thing there's an option, based on which you can let Twitter 👀 know you're not interested, which I did and the Arabic ads stopped. I've never been served Arabic ads before, so the only thing that justifies what happened is that Google tracked my activity and based on it decided to show me Arabic ads.
These two cases made me thing how free we are, if we're free at all and how many people/apps are watching us on a daily bases without us even realizing it. One way or another we're always being watched.
I'd suggest you pay more attention to what you are granting access to, no matter how tired you are or in a rush. There's always a choice.
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Good day. I noticed this problem too. In this life you have to pay for everything. The sad thing is that the developers are deceiving us. They write that the program is completely free, but in fact this program uses our phone for advertising. Plus uses our data. The world is very cruel, unfortunately. Thank you for the interesting post.
Hello, unfortunately that is true.
No free lunch in this world!! As soon as you use Google to log in to an app you're basically opening up a chunk of you're personal life. Your google searches, map searches, translation, even photos are all lucrative revenue source for companies.
It happens in all countries, the only difference is that some countries use it to make money off you whereas others use it to intrude into your personal life and freedom.
When the product is free it’s either they try to up sell you or you provide them with something of more value like your info which they can resell. That’s the state of the internet today