The Hated One
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MKBHD's Wallpaper App Is A Privacy Disaster
🕑 Added 2024-09-30 18:32:49 +0000 UTCMarques Keith Brownlee is a YouTube star behind the massively popular MKBHD channel. Over the span of his 15-year-old content creator career, Marques Brownlee grew to 20 million subscribers surpassing 4 billion total views and that only vaguely illustrates the true heights of his success.
Marques started making content in 2009, when he was still in high school and in a few years, he became the face of technology videos on YouTube. In 2013, a senior vice president of Google called him “the best technology reviewer on the planet right now”. In 2019, he won “Creator of the Decade”. MKBHD’s fame was acknowledged also by his interviews with big tech CEOs as well as Kobe Bryant and Bill Gates. Marques is also a star of the Retro Tech YouTube Originals series produced by Vox Media Studios and he recently became a board member of Ridge, a super popular sponsor of YouTube channels.
His success, fame and wealth is out of this world. Especially at his young age. Marques is barely 30 now and he’s been on the top stop before he even graduated college. But it seems that not even that amount of success is enough, if you think you have a loyal audience of millions of people who will consume anything you have to sell them.
Marques Brownlee decided to embark on another endeavor to attain even more wealth by making an app. Now Marques has a degree in business and IT so you’d think his app must be a total banger. Something humble but with great value.
So what did Marques make? A wallpaper app. And not just any wallpaper app. MKBHD’s wallpaper app that is a privacy nightmare and a shameless cash grab disaster.
The revenue split between artist and the Panels app is 50/50, with the Panels cut further split in half between Brownlee and the Panels developer.
MKBHD is committed to fixing his wallpaper app, but not its $50 price tag
https://www.androidauthority.com/mkbhd-to-fix-wallpaper-app-3484751/
Panels on Play Store
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=art.panels.wallpapers.playstore
Panels on App Store
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/panels-wallpapers/id6474455074
MKBHD's response to criticism: https://x.com/MKBHD/status/1838582554749755438
Apple data collection tied to device identifiers (DSID)
https://www.engadget.com/apple-phone-usage-data-not-anonymous-researchers-185334975.html
https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-privacy-dsid-analytics-personal-data-test-1849807619
https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-when-off-app-store-1849757558
Free and open source wallpaper apps
Paperize https://f-droid.org/packages/com.anthonyla.paperize/
Wallflow https://f-droid.org/packages/com.ammar.wallflow/
Wall You https://f-droid.org/packages/com.bnyro.wallpaper/
Comments
The Hated One
Yeah I don't think he's a bad person but this is definitely one those "being preoccupied with whether or not you could you never asked yourself whether you should" things.
Jon
I enjoy his tech reviews and I’m disappointed he has gone down this path to the dark side - joining the data brokers and supporting surveillance capitalism.
