Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Auto opt-in sharing app usage with Verizon (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by collar@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Just updated to iOS 26 and a few hours later got this notice about “enchanted 5g” for some apps. I had no idea what it was, so I checked the details and saw that it was automatic enabled and shares info about what apps you use with Verizon. If it wasn’t for this notification I would have no idea this was running.

No thanks. Disable that.

Edit: “enchanted” lol. Meant enhanced.

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[–] voided@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 1 month ago

I looked further into this and I think this is just really bad communication on Apple's part. This is network slicing and basically lets apps call for a dedicated 5G connection tailored for them.

So if this is on, a compatible app can say, "I'm streaming live video, please prioritize for low latency and packet loss", or like a navigation app can say "I'm a background service, I don't care about latency, packet loss, or throughput stability".

It isn't sharing exactly what apps are being used, just what type of network service the apps need. So while Verizon might be able to infer what type of activities you're doing, your actual activity is encrypted and can still be hidden behind a VPN. This seems like it's just for better network stability and speed, and I wouldn't consider it a violation of privacy.