[deleted]
Android: I don't need your permission
21–30 of 190 posts
Re: Android: I don't need your permission
#22I made app ethics[1] a while back in hopes to surface what some of the android permissions mean.
Re: Android: I don't need your permission
#23> If your app is closed-source then they have no way of verifying you're not downloading all their contacts to their servers. That's a common fallacy. Even if it is open source someone could still be doing that. In order to be secure you would have to: A) Download the source yourself B) Inspect the source C) Compile the source Just because you have the source doesn't mean what you get from the Play Store/Amazon App s…
It's also easy to set up a man-in-the-middle proxy and watch the network traffic an app is sending.
And if you can't make head or tails of it, you may conclude "good, it seems encrypted. Unfortunately, that means I cannot tell what they send to their server".
Re: Android: I don't need your permission
#24> If your app is closed-source then they have no way of verifying you're not downloading all their contacts to their servers. That's a common fallacy. Even if it is open source someone could still be doing that. In order to be secure you would have to: A) Download the source yourself B) Inspect the source C) Compile the source Just because you have the source doesn't mean what you get from the Play Store/Amazon App s…
And of course, you can always see if an app is uploading your contact data to their servers, even if that app is closed source.
Re: Android: I don't need your permission
#25The same goes for android.permission.INTERNET. Apps can open arbitrary URLs in the browser (which load without user intervention).
However that's not the only use case for android.permission.INTERNET - you need it for anything that does networking on the internet, such as API calls to your web application.
So the entire computer world had run like this for decade. why are people complaining about that now? Because Apple is doing strict verification of your code behaviour?
Yesterday adobe pdf viewer tell me that an update was available both on my mac and pc! So without asking my permission, this computer application (and many others) are querying the web...
Re: Android: I don't need your permission
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also easy to set up a man-in-the-middle proxy and watch the network traffic an app is sending.
And if you can't make head or tails of it, you may conclude "good, it seems encrypted. Unfortunately, that means I cannot tell what they send to their server".
I assume you'd set up a custom CA on your proxy so you can spy on the https traffic. I'd be suspicious if I saw large blogs of data that had been encrypted in the application instead of at the network layer.
Re: Android: I don't need your permission
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may seem a bit silly to add this, but I think it is good to link the reference for those who may not have seen it before: Even compiling from source, one also has to trust the compiler... (see, e.g. the classic http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html , pdf version at https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp... )
And then you have to trust the OS. And the machine... Unless you build you computer yourself from silicon, you're not going to get rid of trust.
Then you would also have to trust that your knowledge of how silicon processing and manufacture is correct, and that whomever taught you how to do so was not malicious. At some point, it all becomes a circlejerk of Cartesian doubt.
Re: Android: I don't need your permission
#28> If your app is closed-source then they have no way of verifying you're not downloading all their contacts to their servers. That's a common fallacy. Even if it is open source someone could still be doing that. In order to be secure you would have to: A) Download the source yourself B) Inspect the source C) Compile the source Just because you have the source doesn't mean what you get from the Play Store/Amazon App s…
The chain of trust doesn't quite stop at compiling the source, in order to be really sure that nothing unintended is going on you have to compile the compiler yourself. At the end of the day you will have to trust some bootstrapping binary compiler unless you put it together yourself in machine language.
Good point. Given sufficient paranoia this train of suspicion can be continued even deeper down the rabbit hole: you'd need to inspect the hardware designs and make sure the hardware you've got was actually produced according to the inspected designs.
In technology as elsewhere, it seems life is ultimately based on trust in someone.
Re: Android: I don't need your permission
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
However that's not the only use case for android.permission.INTERNET - you need it for anything that does networking on the internet, such as API calls to your web application.
So the entire computer world had run like this for decade. why are people complaining about that now? Because Apple is doing strict verification of your code behaviour? Yesterday adobe pdf viewer tell me that an update was available both on my mac and pc! So without asking my permission, this computer application (and many others) are querying the web...
The PCs didn't sit in your pocket all data with sensing GPS location, mic, camera, footsteps, discovery of bluetooth and wifi devices around you; neither were they single point of communication with the rest of the world.
Re: Android: I don't need your permission
#30> If your app is closed-source then they have no way of verifying you're not downloading all their contacts to their servers. That's a common fallacy. Even if it is open source someone could still be doing that. In order to be secure you would have to: A) Download the source yourself B) Inspect the source C) Compile the source Just because you have the source doesn't mean what you get from the Play Store/Amazon App s…
And of course, you can always see if an app is uploading your contact data to their servers, even if that app is closed source.
Anyone could use a network sniffer to see it is uploading something, but you can't tell what since the content may be encrypted. Advanced user may be able to follow the data in a debugger, but that's a lot of work. Very advanced user could instrument the code to perform data flow analysis, see https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wklieber/papers/soap2014-didfail.pdf