this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
620 points (94.5% liked)

Technology

71042 readers
3469 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 223 points 1 week ago (23 children)
  1. It’s also android phones. All of the shots in the article are of android phones.

  2. This is likely just recording sessions of the carrier’s app, not everything on your phone. Session recording for CS and UX is pretty common these days. It can be impossible to identify a problem unless you actually see what is happening in the app.

That said, you have to ask for consent for this shit. A lot of companies don’t alert customers when they release a new tool that requires privacy consent.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 51 points 1 week ago (12 children)

This is so. At the bottom of the article it says:

To help us give customers who use T-Life a smoother experience, we are rolling out a new tool in the app that will help us quickly troubleshoot reported or detected issues. This tool records activities within the app only and does not see or access any personal information. If a customer’s T-Life app currently supports the new functionality, it can be turned off in the settings under preferences.

So yes, it can only see itself, i.e. within the T-Mobile app. It's still dumb.

I'm not well versed enough in Android app development to answer whether or not one userspace app can even access the screen contents of another app without root or special permissions, but it wouldn't surprise me if there are several roadblocks in that path on the part of the OS for obvious reasons.

[–] underline960@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 week ago (6 children)

For quality assurance reasons, we've defined 'within the app' as 'everything on the phone while our app is running in the background'.

[–] pixely@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That’s not possible without a permission prompt (on both iOS and android). So there’s no changing the goalposts like you suggest, without the user giving explicit permission.

[–] Lyrl@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's not possible at all, no permission exists that lets an Android app record something in another app. Much to the sadness of the mobile Hearthstone community that would love collection managers and stat tracking apps like what PC and Mac have.

[–] refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, it's possible with something like Shizuku. scrcpy works via adb, so something similar could work on-device.

It's just not a part of Android's standard permission system.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)
load more comments (19 replies)