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T-Mobile secretly records iPhone screens and claims it's being helpful. (www.droid-life.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 month 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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month 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'.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The API for iOS screen recording is sandboxed to the app itself. There is currently no system-wide screen recording API for developers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

iOS does have an API for apps to record the screen throughout the OS these days through Broadcast Extensions, but it has to be user-initiated through the control center screen recording toggle (where they then get to pick what app to record the screen to instead of just saving as a video), it wouldn't do that people think the T-Mobile app is doing

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I see it now. Yes, broadcasting is available, but with the limitations you’ve specified. Thanks for the update/correction!

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