Hey, this is the Daily Overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps!
Now today, I wanna talk about getting tarred with the same brush!
Ok so yesterday a friend of mine sent me an article from the Sunday Times - that's one
of the major newspapers out here in the UK, and the articles headline was "Google is cashing
in on spy apps for stalkers".
And the article is all about the many spy apps on Google Play and on the Android market.
Some of them are really bad, a lot of them are geared towards actually tracking the whereabouts
of your spouse or your girlfriend or spying on them, reading their text messages on their
phone and basically just becoming a nuisance.
A lot of these things are actually illegal and he talks about how google ads are actually
making money from these, google is actually making money from it even though it's the
app developers that do it.
Of course, the reason my friend sent this to me is because it's right in my wheel house,
like, my biggest app is called Ear Agent and for the longest time it was called Ear Spy.
So I see a lot of these things and I see a lot of these apps out there on the app market.
and a lot of people have advised that I put these features into the app which is just
crossing the line.
And a lot of times I'm always thinking about what is that line?
We don't wanna cross it, we don't wanna do something that's illegal.
My whole thing was, when I was a kid i wanted to be a spy...what kind of gadgets would a
spy have on them?
One of them would be being able to hear longer distances or whatever.
So we did a very simple application which was to take the audio coming in and have an
equaliser on it so I could turn the volume all the way up and hear better.
And it was actually after we released it I found toys in Toys R Us which did the exact
same thing, a baby monitor does the same thing.
So, even things like I thought about people say "hey you know what would be great?
If you do it over the internet using sockets or whatever so you can listen to whats in
the office from your home or whatever, anywhere in the world!"
We would not do that because that was just too creepy.
In fact, when people keep asking us to put their SDK's in our application it was too
creepy so I thought no, it's just gonna be what it is.
it's just gonna be the kind of thing that, as a kid, a toy that I would use.
And I have special insights into this because, because of the application, we get a lot of
emails that come in, like for the last 5 years we get occasional emails saying "hey, how
do I use your app to listen to what my wife is talking about on her phone?" or "how do
I use your app to - I need to find out what my wife's text messaging.
I think my wife is cheating on me", "I think my boyfriend is cheating on me" - we hear
these things all the time, and a lot of times its just standard response that we do.
We say "hey, we're really sorry about the problems that you're having in your relationship
because you're obviously hurting, but our app doesn't do any of this stuff.
It's just a very simple hearing augmentation app.
In fact, last year, changing it from Ear Spy to Ear Agent was actually a very good thing
for us because it kind of distanced us a little bit from all that stuff.
but, when I see articles like this I still have this fear of being tarred with the same
brush and when I think about this, I think about cookies in browsers.
I don't know if you remember, but there was a time when everyone got really crazy about
cookies.
If you're a web developer you know that you don't really get any more information from
a cookie other than if the person visiting your site is the same person that visited
before.
You don't know any other details about them.
I mean you could probably code it that way but most of the time you don't know anything
about them, you just don't.
And you can only hold a few bytes of information on it, it was ridiculous, but it got crazy!
People said "these cookies are tracking you all over the place", and really the main reason
we use them is because when you log in, http is stateless so if you hit a website two times,
you don't know if it's the same person coming back that did before.
You could get tricky and start using ip addresses and everything like that but that's not necessarily
reliable, so you use the cookies.
And I can remember people saying "I just go through and delete my cookies all the time",
it's like dude, you must love logging into stuff.
And now we have that cookie law thing on our websites that says "do you accept cookies
on this website?" and some people just say "yeah, nice try buddy!" and remove it.
And it turns out that some ways they are tracking you.
That's why ads are able to follow you around all over the place.
My website doesn't have access to all the sites that you've done because I only have
the one domain or whatever.
But these ad networks, because they use little i frames or whatever tricks they use I don't
know, but they're able to track all the different places you've been and all this kind of stuff.
So, as a web developer you get tarred with the same brush, so you have to put these cookie
laws on there, and we do that.
The ad thing there , I worry about getting tarred with the same brush there too.
When something hits the mainstream news you think "ah, it's not!"
But for those of you guys out there who use Ear Spy or Ear Agent, we don't track any of
that kind of stuff, other than augmenting the hearing and turning it up a little bit,
it's what it does.
And also, I talk about this a lot, one of the things when I first released the first
app and just getting into the app marketing, the marketing side of things, is I realised
it's not always about what the thing does.
As a developer, we think about what it does is important, the idea is important or what
the actual thing does.
It's not just what it does, it's the perception of what it does.
When you think about marketing on the positive side, how do people find it?
If your app is the best app in the world but nobody knows how to find it, nobody knows
that it exists, it might as well not exist at all.
The same is true, if your app is the most legitimate but it's tarred with the same brush
as a lot of people doing bad things, then you might as well be doing the bad things
because you get tarred with the same brush.
And I've wondered whether or not it's gonna result in my app being removed again, but
hopefully not because I'm not doing anything wrong but it's one of these things.
So anyway, it's an interesting article, I'll include a link to it in the description.
It just adds a bit to the drama I guess!
We'll see.
It is a serious issue.
As a smartphone user, this kind of stuff should be investigated, these kind of apps should
be removed.
Not with a sweeping statement like Apple does, saying "we're just gonna remove anything that
has whatever in it", but somebody going through and looking at it saying "is this violating
the rules?
Is this doing something that it shouldn't do?
Is this breaking the laws in certain countries?"
I think that that makes sense.
Anyway, let me know what you guys think.
I think it's...we'll see how it goes!
Getting tarred with the same brush when you're not doing the same kind of thing, we try to
be very much on the side of...this would be when I was 12 years old the kind of thing
that I would like to have as a toy under the Christmas tree.
That's what we try to make it, and even though a lot of people try to make it out to be something
more than it is.
Anyway, those are my thoughts for today, I'll talk to you guys tomorrow!