Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

Update: just read that Jack and Twitler sat down for a meeting today to discuss “the health of the public conversation on Twitter”. Not touching Twitter again in light of that news.

More progress on this friendo (in the foreground).

Update: I am a terse skim and 100 pages in, and my brain has turned to powdered mush from so much dry reading.

But this is very, very thorough, and surprising in how well media reporting stood up in the fact pattern laid out by this document.

Well, I guess I’m reading this thing tonight. Wish me luck?

Also relevant: https://zenpencils.com/comic/king/

On principal, this should not be a decision I need to make because a popular mobile messaging app is becoming more grabby with data. But that being the reality of it, and with the reality being that many friends use it, I might be able to tolerate this.

I’ll have to think about this more, though.

I am not out to family or out at work. My leading presumption is that (a) the Mormon branch of my family will become extremely aggressive, (b) it’s career-limiting to have a furry identity known by coworkers in my field, and (c) it makes it very difficult for me to share personal thoughts not endorsed by my employer.

Re-evaluating these, I think I might... finally be in a position in which I can weather them okay, when and if they happen?

No response from Telegram support to my question about contact permissions. Hm.

I guess I now get to decide whether I want to let it back on my phone, when I’m reasonably certain it’s scraping new data or someone is actively misusing the contact identification features of the app. I guess I need to assess whether I’m prepared for it to out my private profile to more family and coworkers before proceeding.

Not an easy decision to make, but I might just say fuck it.

I have a new 3D pen, so I made a friend today.

And support request sent.

I wonder if this is something Telegram itself was running or if someone has been using scraped data and fake contact list additions at Telegram's API. Guess I'll see what they reply back with.

So this is weird. Triaging the accounts I blocked yesterday after "X has just joined Telegram", the block rules show completely different users than the ones I added.

Telegram was definitely calling these contacts I recognized yesterday, and now they are... other people? Hmm.

I wonder if this is some kind of phishing thing being run on their platform. Dropping Telegram support a line.

2009 me: I really wish I could find more friends online.
2019 me: I really wish online could stop trying to find more friends for me, to sell, for cash.

Or maybe they hooked up some other data integration I just don’t know about.

Guess I’ll keep it off my phone for awhile and see what happens. 🙃

Also, the clue this isn’t coming in via search on my profile is it manifested both times as an automatic contact creation, which only happens when Telegram thinks you already know a person (ie, via mutual contact list inclusion).

Desktop app contacts listed just the two and folks I manually added in the app.

So that doesn’t look like my contacts being scraped directly by the app? More my CDMA/GV number in others’ contacts?

Also, gaming this out, I don't _think_ I've ever given the application access to the phone's number or call history (which is a separate permission in iOS). But I imagine it can get this from metadata pretty easily.

I just reinstalled the app from cloud backup briefly to read its permissions: Siri and Search, Background App Refresh, Cellular Data. No contacts permission or permission to read handset info.

So what do? I don't want to be alarmist here, but I'd really like Telegram to not be blasting my info to contacts it shouldn't have.