What the heck is this "ANDROID: Have U Won?" notification on my Android phone?, a photo by thepetecom on Flickr.
It reads "The Phone Lottery Has Chosen (1) Number (optout at xapush.com)". What the heck is this thing? When you go to that URL it forwards to airpush.com, which is a mobile ads company, apparently. This is utterly uncool of them to force users to opt out when the only notification we got that we were opting in was via one of those ridiculously long TOSes some apps make you agree to. Man, all this compromising privacy and trading convenience for annoyance we're doing in the world of tech these days is really starting to look like a bad idea. From all the iPhone killswitch, to the CarrierIQ stuff, to this sort of thing, I wonder how much worse it'll get before it gets better.
