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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

peabee.substack.com

101–110 of 502 posts

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#101

> How is knowing whether I have the Xbox or the Playstation app installed on my phone essential to their Swiggy's core functionality? How will knowing if I have the Naukri or Upstox app help them deliver groceries to my doorstep? It is for fingerprinting purposes

fingerprinting is the best case scenario

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#102

> everyone knows all the alls on your phone On Android phones. iPhone doesn’t have this privacy deficiency.

On iOS it's kinda worse in some ways. If you enroll into a company MDM they can see all your apps. On Android if they use the work profile (which is the standard method these days) they can only see the apps inside there.

get a separate device for work ?

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#103
post #90

The ACTION_MAIN loophole has been written about before: https://commonsware.com/blog/2020/04/05/android-r-package-vi... Google refuses to patch this. I wonder what would happen if you submit it to the Android VDP as a permission bypass. There’s also this SO question by the author about the bypass: https://stackoverflow.com/q/79527331

What do you mean with "refused to patch this"? Google will reject any app publishing attempt that asks for that filter and isn't a launcher on Play store.

Author claims that this same hack is used widely, including by apps on the Play Store like Snapchat and Facebook.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#104

> How is knowing whether I have the Xbox or the Playstation app installed on my phone essential to their Swiggy's core functionality? How will knowing if I have the Naukri or Upstox app help them deliver groceries to my doorstep? It is for fingerprinting purposes

fingerprinting is the best case scenario

What's the worst case, in your opinion?

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#106

The ACTION_MAIN loophole has been written about before: https://commonsware.com/blog/2020/04/05/android-r-package-vi... Google refuses to patch this. I wonder what would happen if you submit it to the Android VDP as a permission bypass. There’s also this SO question by the author about the bypass: https://stackoverflow.com/q/79527331

> Google refuses to patch this.

That's why projects like XPL-Extended (and previously XPrivacyLua), are an absolute need. I never run an android phone without these.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#107

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.

Long-time Win32 programmer here - yes. This is by design. To use an analogy, Windows is like a "high-trust society".

There are functions EnumWindows() and EnumChildWindows() specifically for this purpose.

See utilities "Windows Modifier v2.00" (when I first downloaded it there were many pages about it, but it's a sign of how forgetful the Internet has become that I barely get any results about it now even searching for that exact name) and Microsoft's own Spy++ (SPYXX.EXE) for an example of this functionality.

The solution to an app you don't trust is to not use it at all, or use it in a VM.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#109
post #90

The ACTION_MAIN loophole has been written about before: https://commonsware.com/blog/2020/04/05/android-r-package-vi... Google refuses to patch this. I wonder what would happen if you submit it to the Android VDP as a permission bypass. There’s also this SO question by the author about the bypass: https://stackoverflow.com/q/79527331

What do you mean with "refused to patch this"? Google will reject any app publishing attempt that asks for that filter and isn't a launcher on Play store.

How is that congruent with the article's claim that 31 out of 47 apps they tested had this filter?
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