ShopSavvy invasion of privacy?

[daveid]

I removed it once I realized it was responsible for using my GPS without being asked to. Never really used the program either, so I don't know what it thought it was updating. I'd rather my phone not do things behind my back without asking me (or me telling it to).

[torturedsoul802]

Hmmm...oddly enough, I've never had this problem whatsoever

[Steelers-Shaun]

If you run the app "Close Everything" you will see the "remote shopsavy" thing getting closed....lets email the DEV....what gives?!

[fritz269]

I was using shopsavvy this weekend and did notice the WIFI icon being turned up but I disregarded it. I did notice the battery drain so I guess I should take a look to seeif the GPS is turned on. Thanks for the heads up.

[Droideo]

Here is video from Shopsavvy which explains about the privacy problem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ann8BYlVwwI

[Steelers-Shaun]

Here is video from Shopsavvy which explains about the privacy problem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ann8BYlVwwI

Thanx! From what the video explained you can go into (open ShopSavvy) settings.Privacy and then turn OFF "Find my location". It informs you if you do this "local pricing" feature will NOT be available.

[f4phantomii]

It's poor programming from the devs....there is absolutely *zero* reason to use the GPS to obtain "fine" location for these types of services. The closest they need to get is what zipcode you are in....that's pretty much it.

But I've noticed a lot of location based services like to fire up the GPS rather needlessly to obtain "fine" location when the cell tower based "coarse" location would do just fine.

I'm assuming that ShopSavvy is doing the trifecta in that it also fires up the WiFi periodically to try and determine location in the event the GPS isn't getting a sufficient signal.

[Steelers-Shaun]

OK.... even AFTER changing the privacy settings as i mentioned earlier in the post, you STILL have the shopsavvy.remote process running on the phone....that = a big UNinstall of one of my favorite programs. That is unacceptable!

[jasonhudgins]

Hi guys, time for me to step in and clear up some of the confusion I'm seeing here. The latest version of ShopSavvy will attempt to pre-fetch your location in order to provide more accurate local results. We realized that not everyone would be comfortable with this, so we included the ability to disable this via the privacy option in the settings.

Now a bit about background processes on Android... just because you see something in your process list doesn't mean it's actively "running", once a service is finished and stops executing Android does not immediantly remove the process as you'd expect on a normal linux system, it will linger around in a sleeping/inactinve/suspend state until android decides it needs to reclaim that memory. You can check out this thread for more info :

http://groups.google.com/group/andro...4eb8d7a1616faf

With regards to the shopsavvy process, it's really just an alarm that fires every couple hours, and runs for less than a minute before shutting down, we tested this for at least a month prior to release and haven't seen any noticable impact on battery life, in fact there are already plenty of background processes running on the device that are far more active, battery draining.

With regards to the wifi being enabled, that's something we didn't find out about until post release, the skyhook api will activate the wifi for a few seconds and deactivate it when it tries to get a location fix, we're working with their engineers to see if we can come up with a better solution, but i'll admit, this one caught us by surprise.

Oh, and one last thing, if you enable privacy mode, and then reboot your phone (a very brute force way to get android to clear out it's process table), then you shouldn't see any shopsavvy processes in the background, and if you do it's a bug and you should PM me =). When you flip on privacy mode android provides no way to "kill" the process, we can only shut down the service and wait for the OS to clear the underlying process.

[TheBlur]

Thank you for clarifying the confusion Jason. I've been following your updates for a while now and like all the udpates you have made to the application thus far and definitley like the new features you're working on.

I think people are really concerned about invasion of privacy these days and this was definitely one of those times were it was overblown. And for those people that uninstalled the application without knowing what was happening I say shame on you. These guys (ShopSavvy) have been answering questions here on Android Community since the beginning and it was only a matter of time before they answered to your concerns.