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    <title>irl - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>irl</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 8-23-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>This story starts in the dead hours of the morning, where I get a text from an unknown number.</p>
<p>&quot;Maybe it's my college roommate?&quot; I wonder, and then I start panicking, because how in the world would my roommate have gotten my number? Or maybe it's one of my family members whose contact I lost in the migration to my new phone since I forgot to configure DavDroid before the move. Or maybe it's one of my old friends trying to get in contact with me again.</p>
<p>It was spam from some shitty app called IRL, calling me by my deadname and saying that someone had &quot;complimented&quot; me.</p>
<p>I remember the dregs of high school, the old one I went to before I moved and everything went to hillbilly hell. There was this app called &quot;After School&quot; that required you to sign in with a Facebook account so it could &quot;confirm&quot; that it went to the school whose stream you were trying to access. Never mind that one could easily create a fake profile with said school for the sole purpose of accessing that app... But once one got in, they could leave any kind of anonymous message for everyone else who was accepted into that school's stream to see.</p>
<p>It wasn't any kind of intellectual haven. 99% of the posts were either people talking about their crushes or calling each other whores.</p>
<p>IRL is along the same strain of apps. Except this one automatically tried to snatch my contacts, leading me to frantically dive into the system settings and cut off all of the app's permissions except for phone, which it apparently needed in order to... sign up. Once I got past the five hundred questions to set up a profile (all of which I fudged or outright lied on), I finally got to my notifications to see what was worth spamming me on three different numbers.</p>
<p>Someone nominated me for &quot;Brave AF&quot;.</p>

<p>Was it worth it, anonymous internet person? Was leaking my number to a shady shitty social app worth the accolades without the social consequences? Was praising me without revealing your name worth knowing that my phone number and full birth name is now floating around on the internet, at the mercy of whoever coded and runs IRL not to sell to marketers and data aggreggators and spammers alike?</p>
<p>IRL sucks up all your contacts by default. They have your name and phone number, and the names and phone numbers of all the people in your phone, and those of all the other people using their service, and they have the power to connect the dots. So what if a small handful of people are kind and put my preferred name in their contacts? One person puts my deadname in with my phone number, and it's game over for my anonymity.</p>
<p>You think this won't be exploited? You think this can't be tapped into by the government with a single subpoena?</p>
<p>I hereby nominate you for &quot;Asshole AF&quot;, and I don't need a closed-source proprietary app to tell you that.</p>
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