JAKARTA – A lot of Indonesians do not really pay attention on privacy when it comes to applications.
Indonesian netizens have ridiculed government officials for claiming that the wildly popular augmented reality game Pokemon Go posed a serious national security threat, saying their belief was nothing but paranoia.
Although the game has not yet been officially released in this country, it has been downloaded from unofficial sources by Indonesian users, many of whom do not seem to care that using online applications, including Pokemon Go, may come with a price: privacy invasion.
The Guardian reported that privacy concerns emerged following the release of Pokemon Go, with users fearing that the game might allow “its developers, Niantic Labs, to read and send email, access, edit and delete documents in Google Drive and Google Photos and access browser and maps histories”.
But do Indonesians care about online privacy?
Felix Filbert Arsyadi, 27, a property agent, downloaded the Pokemon Goapplication a month ago through an Android application package (APK) link given to him by a friend who played the game before.
As he was curious about the game, he directly installed the application on his HTC One smartphone and started to play it without noticing that the app asked for permission to access his basic profile, email account and other private information.
“I only click OK, OK and OK usually,” he said, saying that he did not care about what the app requested as long as he was able to download the app he wanted to use.
Felix said that he never cared about the security systems because other applications he downloaded usually also requested the same things.
Adam Muhammad Nur, a Bandung-based private teacher, said he knew that applications usually asked for “permissions” to access his data before installation.
However, he said that he never truly paid attention to the details of the terms and conditions.
“I did not know that the app is actually able to read our data,” he said.
For many people, reading the terms and conditions is too much of a hassle.
“Reading the whole terms and conditions takes much time. I usually judge an app based on its rating. If the app has a good review, I assume it’s safe for download,” said Titis Panularsih, a sales and marketing officer with an airline company.
But some popular applications designed for smartphones, can activate GPS, track browsing histories, read files and transfer contact lists to advertisers, all without the user’s approval, said Heru Sutadi, founder of the Indonesian Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Institute.
Most applications need to self-activate certain features of the phone in order to run properly.
However, Heru said, a problem appears when the apps access more data than needed, including uploading user contact lists to the company server and selling them to third parties or advertisers.
“The developers should have provided options as to what data can be shared,” Heru said.
He acknowledged that users often faced a dilemma because users are required to agree to all terms and conditions before they can start to install an application.
Indonesian Consumers Foundation (YLKI) chairman Tulus Abadi said on Tuesday that consumers needed to be careful when agreeing to certain terms applied by the application developers, because there is no law that specifically regulates online applications in the country.
“Currently, our country doesn’t have any regulation that prohibits application developers or operators from obtaining user data and selling it to third parties,” he said.
Meanwhile, Indonesians have become more and more reliant on online applications to do their daily activities.
Online stores, such as Apple Store and Google Store, offer applications ranging from ride-hailing transportation to house cleaning services.
Many Indonesians, particularly in urban areas, are using ride-hailing apps like Go-Jek, GrabBike and UberMotor.
