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Aral Balkan

Dear Affinity, any thoughts why your Publisher app starts attempting to contact every page on my reading list/bookmarks/browser history including my health insurance provider on launch?

(You cunts.)

(Did I mention I fucking hate capitalism?)

PS. This is an app downloaded from the Mac App Store and it’s got a lovely, comforting, blue, Apple-approved checkmark to let you know that data is not collected. So it’s safe. *phew!*

Screenshot of the Little Snitch network monitor showing a list of sites Affinity Publisher attempted to contact on launch. The ones for their company related sites (starting with serif) were allowed. Others, to sites that were on either on my bookmarks or history, including vhi.ie, a health insurance company, were denied (by yours truly).
Screenshot of the Affinity Publisher 2 page on the Apple App Store. Under App Privacy, it says “Data Not Collected”
#surveillance#capitalism#affinity
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Der Teilweise

@aral Doesn’t happen here. 2.5.7, non-AppStore.

Did you write about it in their forums? Their staff actually reads reports there and they tag bug reports so a bot will add a comment when the fix is released. Quite the opposite of how Apple handles bug reporting.

Given how serious this is, I‘m convinced they will investigate it.

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Aral Balkan

@teilweise Nope, uninstalled it instead. I don’t work for free for Big Tech. That said, I also don’t work for money for Big Tech so 🤷‍♂️

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Der Teilweise

@aral Fair. Do you mind if I mention this thread on the forum?

I think this needs to be fixed and since this does not happen for everyone it might be worth making sure that Serif is aware of the issue.

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Der Teilweise

@aral I finally found the time to report it (forum.affinity.serif.com/index), here’s the response by a user marked as “staff”:

“From speaking to the Dev team, this will be Apple components doing their own checks. Affinity itself can't and doesn't read you browser bookmarks or reading list. This has also been reported for other apps as well, one of those reports is here (community.bitwarden.com/t/litt).”

Of course I cannot verify this but it sounds reasonable.

Affinity | ForumUnexpected network connection, accessing bookmarks and reading list entries.Referring to this post on Mastodon: The Affinity suite apps seem to access the bookmarks and reading list entries on start and try to access (all of) those websites. The apps should not connect any web service unless the user opted in and I do not see any reason to access the bookmarks or reading...
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Aral Balkan

@teilweise Thanks for checking. Good to know. Still don’t trust them though (they’re Canva now).

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