Linked List: May 18, 2022

Wednesday, 18 May 2022

Apple Previews Upcoming Accessibility Features ★

Apple, kicking off Global Accessibility Awareness Day:

Using advancements across hardware, software, and machine learning, people who are blind or low vision can use their iPhone and iPad to navigate the last few feet to their destination with Door Detection; users with physical and motor disabilities who may rely on assistive features like Voice Control and Switch Control can fully control Apple Watch from their iPhone with Apple Watch Mirroring; and the Deaf and hard of hearing community can follow Live Captions on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple is also expanding support for its industry-leading screen reader VoiceOver with over 20 new languages and locales. These features will be available later this year with software updates across Apple platforms.

Amazing features, one and all. And Apple has been delivering on these accessibility feature previews — we should expect to see all of these in action by this week next year. (A lot of them seem like they’d be useful with AR glasses, too.)

Google Messages RCS Being Abused for Spam in India ★

Ben Schoon, reporting for 9to5Google:

Brought to our attention by Ishan Argwal on Twitter, RCS ads in Google Messages appear to be coming from “Verified Business” accounts. Google first announced that functionality back in 2020, for the purposes of allowing customers to talk to businesses. Advertising was surely part of the functionality, but it’s clearly being abused in India. Android Police says these ads have been going out for almost a year now, citing examples of ads sent by Kotak Mahindra Bank, Bajaj Finserv, Buddy Loan, and PolicyBazaar. From what we can tell from user reports, it appears the frequency of these ads has been picking up over the past few months especially.

These ads are not harmless, either, with many of the examples we’ve seen being for personal loans, a category that tends to be full of predatory practices. One user reports that they were sent one of these ads on a phone that didn’t even have an active SIM card in it.

Currently, it seems as though this practice is primarily happening in the Indian market, at least in this quantity.

Yet another success story in Google’s storied history of messaging services.

According to Android Police, the only solution to this spam is to disable RCS. Anyone arguing that Apple should add RCS support to iOS should have their head examined.

‘Watching You’ – New Privacy Ad From DuckDuckGo ★

Pairs well with Apple’s new spot. Fun too, to see the “Get It On Google Play” banner on the closing screen.

‘Data Auction’ – New Privacy Ad From Apple ★

Nice sequel to last year’s “Tracked”.

In a mere 90 seconds, while telling an actual story, it manages to work in a slew of iOS privacy features, including App Tracking Transparency, Mail Privacy Protection, Safari’s tracker detection, and the fact that your Contacts database requires your permission for an app to access. (Also worth noting, although it doesn’t come up in the ad: when you share a contact to someone else, the shared contact does not contain your Notes field. Update: And even just to access the Contacts database, period, developers need a special entitlement.)

The only major recent privacy feature not featured in the ad is one of my favorites: iCloud Private Relay. The decision not to promote iCloud Private Relay in the ad could well be explained by the fact that it’s still labeled “beta” in both iOS and MacOS. I’ve been using it ever since it became available with very few problems.