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NY Comic Con Takes Over Attendees' Twitter Accounts To Praise Itself
Okian Warrior writes "Attendees to this year's New York Comic Con convention were allowed to pre-register their RFID-enabled badges online and connect their social media profiles to their badges — something, the NYCC registration site explained, that would make the 'NYCC experience 100x cooler! For realz.' Most attendees didn't expect "100x cooler" to translate into 'we'll post spam in your feed as soon as the RFID badge senses that you've entered the show,' but that seems to be what happened."
ReedPop's apology was insincere and showed no remorsefulness. They've done it before and they'll do it again.
Morale of the story: don't use your social media accounts for any type of authentication.
The people allowed the app, complete with special warning, to 'post tweets on their behalf'.
There comes a time in your life where you take responsibility for your own actions. For the most part, we call this adulthood.
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When you connect your social media account to somethiing, it's reasonable to expect that every permission that they describe they are requesting they are actually going to use. If you're not comfortable with this, then don't connect the account to the service. Period.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
But they didn't steal an identity. Just requested allowance to post on a Twitter feed. Unless they did something other than what the article said, there's no identity theft going on. Giving someone access to use your broadcast mechanism is hardly equal to slavery.
The people allowed the app, complete with special warning, to 'post tweets on their behalf'.
Problem is, there is no way to say "install the app, but block all tweet-related permissions"
Can't install anything on Android nowdays. Each app wants permissions to make phone calls, take pictures with your camera (without your knowledge, not just while it is used) or read address book and current phone state. No good reason for the app to want this, but no way to install without allowing everything the app asks for.
It is impossible for anything posted to a Twitter feed to be spam, since seeing it requires you to follow that feed.
By that logic, it is impossible for anything posted in a newsgroup to be spam, since seeing it requires you to read that newsgroup. Which is a pretty silly interpretation, given the history involved.
You're not the only person here who "was on the Internet when the term was invented," you know.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I just finished up at a company that creates mobile apps for clients (under contract). Pretty much every app being made now (by all companies not just the one I worked at) uses at least one of your social media accounts to log in. It saves them from having to create and manage their own authentication mechanism. It also saves them from lawsuits etc if and when someone hacks their user database and steals the information because they don't want to spend the money to create a reliably safe user/security system themselves (or on the other hand if they just aren't bright enough to).
So good luck with that, at least for now. And the truth is, most users aren't bright enough to understand the consequences of allowing any and every app out there access to their social media accounts and potentially a tonne of their personal data. That, with only the trust of the company that build the app's integrity because they said they might have one in the copy on the page. Meanwhile the one thousand line user agreement designed to cover their ass no matter what they do says they can change their mind without telling you. Or after you are so committed to it that psychologically you can't break free... kind of like Google wanting to suddenly use all your profile information in advertisements. Now I understand why they wanted so much to get people to change their usernames to their real names. It wasn't for protection. Glad I didn't change mine.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Sedgwick, W.T., 1888, On Variations Of Reflex-Exciteablilty In The Frog, Induced By Changes Of Temperature. Studies From The Biological Laboratory, pp385-410.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?