I don’t have the right configuration of equipment to use an app like this, but does anyone know why this needs to be a service-driven app? What piece of functionality requires a server to track your health?
Motorola needs to hurry up and release their GrapheneOS devices, I need a new phone soon(TM) (next year or two) and I refuse to give google money to buy hardware to avoid Google.
An error? It's useful to know if/when an app wants to access the Internet. So if an app says it's local only you can disable network permissions. Trust but verify.
geo-positioning, maps, way-finding, directions, time of day, calendar, lunar cycle, calculator, notes, language translation, calculator, games, contacts, etc.
I'm assuming the question should be further refined to "why does the service need to know the data". The things that you mention could be done with the service only having the encrypted blob.
Encryption is more work than not-encryption, and most software is optimally lazy and barely functional. The main goal of the developers is to make the app almost work most of the time, and not crash too much or be so inconvenient that users delete it. Anything past that is extra, and businesses don't pay for extra.
Better revenue model? Pushing some data to the server, serving ads to the app, reselling demographic data, etc all allow for more revenue than just the price of installation.
There are almost certainly other apps in the space that don’t need a server, don’t phone home to Meta, and are lower priced, but they probably aren’t as good at marketing.
From my experience in the startup world, I would wager that this developer probably wanted to track marketing campaign installs (Meta library is required to close the loop on Facebook/Instagram ad conversions after app install) or wanted a feature from some Meta library they integrated but didn’t realize or care about the consequences.
My partner uses the app this article is about (Flo) and I have an account there too in order for her to share the data with me.
I guess you could do it with some sort of P2P sync with cryptography involved locally instead, and/or E2E for stuff sent via the servers. Kind of surprised me they didn't have E2E already, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised anymore.
Computers are useful tools that do useful things for people. It is reasonable for people to want to use them to do things they find useful. They don't have to function like spy devices, but we've chosen to highly reward the people who have turned them into spy devices, so they do. We could choose to do something else with them instead. For example we could pass & enforce privacy regulations so they cannot function as spy devices. Or we could wheel out the guillotines so there are appropriate consequences for the creeps and sociopaths who choose to build and work at places like Facebook. Whichever, I'm flexible.
Like notes apps, reminder apps, etc, data from almost everything we do on phone is saved in cloud.
That data is their business fundamental. Same with this app also.
Not being a women, I've always wondered what insight the app gives regardless of data traveling to a server... does it do anything you can't do with a simple notebook app (like Apple's default Notes)?
If you have an irregular period, does this app help "guess" when it's going to start/end?
If you have a regular period, why do you need an app at all?
I wonder if you would ask the same thing about any number of apps - like fitness trackers, mood trackers, supplement trackers, online diary apps, task trackers, etc? You don't even need a notes app - you could just carry a notebook around or email notes to yourself.
As for why people may want to track menstrual cycles specifically, it is because bodies can be greatly influenced by what phase of the menstrual cycle we are in. From regular physical and mood changes to disorders like PMDD. The different parts of the cycle can also impact ideal exercise and even food choices for some. There are women and couples who gain insights (and often useful predictions) into how their moods coincide with menstrual phases, and that is much easier to track in a dedicated app designed to do so (which can also flag cycle irregularities, bleeding variation, or other changes), just as with other purpose-built applications. All of that is before we even get to the whole fertility tracking thing. One such app is a certified birth control method in my country. Tracking periods in a notes app is not.
Like most data entry software there’s nothing that unstructured notes (or paper) can’t handle.
The main useful feature of the apps (or Apple Health’s tracker which is entirely adequate) is that it sends reminders on the estimated period start date, and then a few days afterwards if you haven’t recorded the end date.
Even “regular” periods often aren’t perfectly regular, or can become irregular when they were regular. (Which is often very important health information.)
It also automatically calculates median period length and typical variation/range.
All unnecessary for some people but very useful for others.
> median period length and typical variation/range.
This was what my partner found useful to share with her doctor while trying to figure out a medical issue. Of course it could have been done typing dates and notes into excel, and manually creating charts, but the chance that she (or most people) would consistently follow that workflow (pun not intended, but I like it) is nil.
It doesn’t? You could easily install the tracker on the client app, no need to do it server side. In fact I bet the app in question (Flo) was doing the upload to Meta client-side.
I'm guessing P2P technology isn't really sufficiently easy for developers yet, so when you have two users using an app that are supposed to share something between the two, most of us default to building server-side services. That + the "dynamic" list of articles and "help" Flo offer I'm guessing is the main reason for them having servers in the first place.
I have actually been playing around with scoping a privacy first version of these tracking apps that store all the data locally with optional sync. It's technically possible, but there's very little in the way of revenue generation there. So it's same issue as always, capitalism corrupts.
I think maybe part of the argument is that Apple’s closed system was a benevolent dictator-style ecosystem that was actually benevolent. Until it wasn’t.
My favorite short story of all time. Between this and Deep Thought in HHGttG, I couldn’t believe the prescience when the bitter lesson was learned and LLMs and GPUs started eating the world.
the LLM parallel does hit different on this read multivac says insufficient data across ten trillion years and the whole story is basically if more compute and more data eventually gets you there. what's weird is the story answers yes, not on any timeframe that helps the people asking tho.
feels uncomfortably close to the actual situation where the models keep getting better and the answer keeps being "not yet, ask again later" while the answer is getting ready years late
I feel like the software running multivac represents something vastly more advanced than today's LLM.
I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
> I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
I can't remember if the machines in "the evitable conflict" are ever called VACs, they might be. The themes in that story do for sure overlap with the story "Franchise" (which is explicitly multivac).
Anyway the multivac from last question probably isn't the same as the one in franchise anyway, because the franchise multivac is the same one as in "all the troubles of the world", and spoilers, but that particular multivac has other problems than entropy. It could be that they "fixed" it, but at this point the timeline with other short stories doesn't add up.
In any case, the VACs would be instances of positronic brains the way the machines in evitable conflict are, so if anything the robots are the ancestors of multivac and not the other way around.
The World Co-ordinator in "the evitable conflict" was a positronic robot (not known to the public), but I think you're right that the machines are never identified as either positronic robots or VACs. But iirc, in the Susan Calvin universe (of which "the evitable conflict" is a part), robots were generally illegal on Earth, the that must make the machines in that story non-robots.
I would say the multivac in "Franchise" is the same Mutlivac as "Last Question" and "all the troubles of the world" (one of my favorites). There are no positronic robots in "Franchise", nor the others.
We work together pretty well. From a 20,000 foot level maybe it looks like chaos and like a central guiding hand would make everything better. But, two people working together is easier to direct than 100,000 people (or more!). Unpacking this gives us the wonders of the economics and behavioral psychology. I’d say, all things considered, we could be doing a hell of a lot worse on cooperation with each other.
Ah geeze, I’m sorry to hear that. We’ve had some strange issue where our landing page doesn’t show for some people? It’s driven us bananas before, and I hoped it was behind us. For what it’s worth, we’re on Google Play [0] and Apple App Store [1]. I appreciate your interest!
This is all very ambitious. I am not exactly sure where someone is supposed to start. With the connections to Pear and Tether I can see where the lines meet, but is the idea that someone takes this and builds…Skynet? AI Cryptocurrency schemes? Just a local LLM chat?
Although an LLM chat is the starting point for many, there are many other use cases. We had people build domotics systems to control their house using natural language, vision based assistants for surveillance (e.g. send a notification describing what's happening instead of a classic "Movement detected") etc. and everything remains on your device / in your network.
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