Should've taken a screenshot, but the reason was something to the effect of “for optimal reddit browsing”. Anyone know what's really going on, and why I got the prompt two weeks after the most recent update?
Posted Aug 11, 2019, 5:58 AM UTC
Narwhal has a web browser -- the area above the comments. When that web browser loads a web page from the internet that the guys who make Narwhal do not control, that web page can ask for all sorts of things, location included, and do all the sketchy shit that web browsers are capable of. It'd be nice if Narwhal just auto-denied these requests, but I could see where someone might want them.
I received the prompt as I was opening the app, so there was no webpage open, unless the app was preloading something. That's why it was so strange to me: there wasn't any obvious source of the request other than Narwhal itself. But maybe it was just something loading in the background.
Interesting! Are you running the app in ad-supported mode? Because the ad provider that the Narwhal guys use has, over the years, allowed some pretty shitty ads through the service. It's possible if Narwhal was loading an ad from the ad provider, the ad it loaded had some location stuff turned on.
I personally consider ads to be a significant security risk to the average person on the internet and go out of my way to block as many of them as I can. It's just too easy for some poorly-run ad provider to let random code from random entities run on your devices. And most ad providers are poorly run, especially in the mobile space.
I mentioned in my other reply but then didn't mention here that nope, I've bought ad-free. Could be, I guess, that it's still making ad requests in the background but not displaying them, but that'd be very strange.
That's super weird. I'm pretty much out of guesses at this point. It's possible Narwhal was retrieving a web page on startup to continue a previous session, which might explain a stray request like this, but I've never seen it do that before.
Location based ads?
Likely wasn’t Narwhal. I’d venture a guess it was a web page you were visiting while using Narwhal.
I received the prompt as I was opening the app, so there was no webpage open, unless the app was preloading something. And I've purchased ad removal, so it shouldn't have been an ad, either.