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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

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Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#41

Post by collingreen »

ctippett wrote: post #38
phony-account wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know someone in adtech and I'm pretty sure Apple allows a similar app manifest that allows you to check for specific apps. I could be wrong. On iOS an app developer will need to register in advance which external applications their app intends to query, and the list needs to be very short and motivated. [1] Incidentally, “I have a friend who says...” isn’t really a good citation anywhere outside Reddit - which HN…

Thanks for the information. I suppose a more appropriate term of phrase would've been "I'd heard anecdotally...", but I agree I was lazy with my original reply. I appreciate the feedback.

You're nice. I don't appreciate the extremely tired "hn looks more and more like Reddit every day" slop and I think you handled it with grace.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#42

Post by lurking_swe »

jerbear4328 wrote: post #25
lurking_swe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this doesn’t make sense and sounds like an excuse IMO. Instead of the browser enumerating all apps, why can’t it check when you visit a page if the current page (ONLY the current page) is installed as an app?

How would the OS know if the app that the browser is querying about is actually the current page? For all the OS knows, the user might be quickly visiting a ton of play.google.com pages for the top 1000 apps on the app store.

> How would the OS know if the app that the browser is querying about is actually the current page?

Maybe i’m missing something, but it sounds like it would be easy for google to support this functionality by letting developers configure this in their app “bundle”. A property that tells the OS “my app is related to domain example.com”. Make it an array of domains if you must.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#43

Post by JumpCrisscross »

OutOfHere wrote: post #4

If Google truly cared about privacy, each app would run in its own strict jail, and permissions would be faked by default. Also, easy malware by Israel or anyone else would not be a thing. As it stands, apps know everything I am doing, and I get targeted spam email rather immediately.

> If Google truly cared about privacy

Have they even been pretending on this front?

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#44

Post by dandersch »

JohnFen wrote: post #30
dTal wrote: post #14

Another fantastic reason to strictly only install apps from F-Droid.

How does that address the problem? Does F-Droid do some sort of additional screening to keep out apps that do this?

packages on f-droid list all required permissions explicitly, and the mentioned permission seems to be listed as "query all packages: Allows an app to see all installed packages.". It doesn't mark the app as having "anti-features", but you can at least make a more informed decision this way.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#45

Post by Tmpod »

It requires root, but you can block/spoof this with an LSPosed[1] module such as XPrivacyLua[2]. I hear there's also the closed-source AppOps[3], but I've never used it.

[1]: https://lsposed.org [2]: https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua / https://github.com/0bbedCode/XPL-EX [3]: https://appops.rikka.app

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#46

Post by halfcat »

facile3232 wrote: post #15
gruez wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most windows apps aren't sandboxed, so them being able to grab window titles is the least of your worries. Any program can steal your login sessions and passwords if they wanted to. https://xkcd.com/1200/

Are you essentially discussing like a keylogger? I can't imagine windows intentionally keeps the plaintext password anywhere longer than it needs to be.

> I can't imagine windows intentionally keeps the plaintext password anywhere longer than it needs to be.

Can’t tell if serious or not [1]. Also any program can read any saved password out of Windows Credential Manager.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimikatz

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#47

Post by Speedy218 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #43
OutOfHere wrote: post #4

If Google truly cared about privacy, each app would run in its own strict jail, and permissions would be faked by default. Also, easy malware by Israel or anyone else would not be a thing. As it stands, apps know everything I am doing, and I get targeted spam email rather immediately.

> If Google truly cared about privacy Have they even been pretending on this front?

They put in a lot of work to make it seem like they do believe it or not, I'm not sure how well it is working out for them though.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#48

Post by reaperman »

collingreen wrote: post #41
ctippett wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the information. I suppose a more appropriate term of phrase would've been "I'd heard anecdotally...", but I agree I was lazy with my original reply. I appreciate the feedback.

You're nice. I don't appreciate the extremely tired "hn looks more and more like Reddit every day" slop and I think you handled it with grace.

Comparing HN to resdit is explicitly against HN guidelines. Though sometimes I think the only reason it’s never “true” is because Reddit is a moving target. Both HN and reddit get worse over time, so HN never catches up to how bad Reddit is.

Also the bots have not invaded HN, which is a truly massive distinction.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#49

Post by halfcat »

edoceo wrote: post #16
cheschire wrote: post #11

Can windows apps (not installed from the MS store) enumerate through the window titles of all open windows? How hard would it be for an app to monitor all of your web traffic based on the title alone? Legit question. ChatGPT isn't super helpful here since it agrees with everything when I'm really looking for someone to say why this isn't really feasible in the real world.

Yep, not difficult at all. This prompt got me some mostly looks OK Python > Can you make a simple windows program that will get all the window titles from active programs running

Definitely possible. This is how chat bots worked on AOL in the 90’s, basically the FindWindow and FindWindowEx functions in the win32 API. Hasn’t changed much (if any) since then.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#50

Post by JohnFen »

dandersch wrote: post #44
JohnFen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that address the problem? Does F-Droid do some sort of additional screening to keep out apps that do this?

packages on f-droid list all required permissions explicitly, and the mentioned permission seems to be listed as "query all packages: Allows an app to see all installed packages.". It doesn't mark the app as having "anti-features", but you can at least make a more informed decision this way.

That's pretty cool, but the article says that most apps that are doing this sort of thing aren't using the query all packages permission and instead are using the facility to provide a specific list of apps they're checking for, which is not permission-gated.
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