> “You have SMS waiting from Dad, Jonathan and Florian”. The mightytext guys thought it would be more engaging to take a look into my recent SMS messages, pick up recent or popular contacts and use it to get me to use the product.
> To me this is crossing some invisible but very clear line. I haven’t used the product yet, and it’s already trawling through my personal stuff?
I'm confused by this example. Isn't this exactly the purpose of MightyText, the app he installed? It's routing your text messages through you server. Obviously their system knows what texts you are sending, otherwise how would it function?
Also, the product has been used if you give it permission to access your contacts.
> I'm confused by this example. Isn't this exactly the purpose of MightyText, the app he installed?
Blog post author here. The purpose of MightyText (as far as I understand it anyway) is to allow me to use SMS through my computer at greater ease. I accept that in order to do that, technically I need to allow the app to access my Android SMS, contacts etc and "act on my behalf" to deliver messages.
I trust the program not to abuse this access I give it. I do not expect it to use this information to spy on me, even if this spying is merely for marketing purposes or to encourage me to use their program more. I think that's the creepy part.
These were not unread messages. The list of names were (probably) taken from the last SMS senders on my phone, before I installed MightyText. Since I don't use SMS much, no new messages were delivered after installing it either. So MightyText went through my old messages, and then sent a reminder/engagement-email using those messages.
EDIT: I've updated the original blog post to make this clear.
> To me this is crossing some invisible but very clear line. I haven’t used the product yet, and it’s already trawling through my personal stuff?
I'm confused by this example. Isn't this exactly the purpose of MightyText, the app he installed? It's routing your text messages through you server. Obviously their system knows what texts you are sending, otherwise how would it function? Also, the product has been used if you give it permission to access your contacts.