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Android: I don't need your permission

blog.danlew.net

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Re: Android: I don't need your permission

#181

Post by sleepychu »

hellbanner wrote: post #179
iscrewyou wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. This is why I am moving to iOS. I installed Pocket. It wanted permission Contacts and Calendar. Contacts, I understand for sharing purposes. Calendar? Yeah, fuck off. Maybe they are bundled together like "read phone status and identity" and Pocket has no way around it. Maybe it is not. As a user, I should not have to worry about that. Contact and Calendar in no way should be bundled together.

There's still no way to pick and choose on Android is there?

Not vanilla, CM's privacy guard does a fairly decent job.

Re: Android: I don't need your permission

#182

Post by ansible »

9point6 wrote: post #166
wtbob wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't matter if contacts were encrypted client-side, but Google seen to have a severe allergy to client-side encryption. Mozilla are really leading the way on this issue. What I think is particularly sad is that Google could still make a huge amount of money without exposing one's private information directly.

Don't all the current nexus devices come with full-device encryption enabled?

I think it is turned on by default for 5.0. But it has certainly been an option before that. I turned it on with my Nexus 4 under 4.4.

Re: Android: I don't need your permission

#183

Post by dllthomas »

MichaelGG wrote: post #176
dllthomas wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes a privacy concern legitimate, to your mind? It's giving data about a person to a group that otherwise would not have had access to it. It seems first order a privacy concern. There's also some possibility it could be turned into more sensitive data - if my app tends to be recommended around social circles, and I see two people were on the phone over the same period of time, it's likely they were talking.

And if a service can reach out to the Internet, it knows my IP can tell where I am. And if it suddenly cuts out after being on a known IP, then maybe I'm going through a local tunnel. That's what I meant by you have to get really creative to think how this could possibly be impacting. If you have a sandbox, you have to choose which permissions you're going to ask for carefully, to avoid overloading users. Android mad…

"The privacy concerns are not significant enough to merit demanding permissions" is certainly a defensible position; I'm not sure whether I agree with it, but it's not crazy.

That is distinct, though, from "there is no privacy concern."

Re: Android: I don't need your permission

#184

Post by kasabali »

9point6 wrote: post #166
wtbob wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't matter if contacts were encrypted client-side, but Google seen to have a severe allergy to client-side encryption. Mozilla are really leading the way on this issue. What I think is particularly sad is that Google could still make a huge amount of money without exposing one's private information directly.

Don't all the current nexus devices come with full-device encryption enabled?

It doesn't make your synced contacts encrypted in client side, though.

Re: Android: I don't need your permission

#185

Post by blueskin_ »

mcherm wrote: post #180
blueskin_ wrote: post #141

This is why I love xprivacy. It gives me a popup when an app tries to access something, and I can whitelist or blacklist it, either on a temporary or permanent basis. Unlike google's halfarsed attempt at a privacy layer, it also doesn't give an exception when an app tries to access restricted data as that can cause apps to crash; it just sends back fake data (device ID is DEFACE, contacts are empty, location is chris…

> Stop trying to do intrusive things like prefilling forms, as it doesn't benefit the user in any real way. Speak for yourself -- I find prefilled forms to be a time-saver. However, I don't want apps trying to read through my contacts in order to do it. What I want (but haven't actually configured) is xprivacy configured to make contacts appear empty.

When an app tries to read your contacts, it gives a popup showing contacts as the item accessed; uncheck 'once' and click deny.

Re: Android: I don't need your permission

#186

Post by acdha »

kuschku wrote: post #178
acdha wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding predictable things like hard-coded strings is a significantly easier task than proving that none of the code is doing something sneaky. It's much easier to look for something like an access key than confirm that the numeric constants being passed to a crypto function are the correct ones or that it's not leaking something which would make it much easier to crack.

We’re not talking about hardcoded strings, lol. This is encryption and obfuscation on multiple levels, classes passing each others state through hashing and encryption schemes on multiple levels, added bytecode hackery, etc.

Exactly my point – it's unreasonable to expect that higher level of reverse engineering will be done reliably for every release of even a small percentage of the apps being published.

Re: Android: I don't need your permission

#187

Post by TheQwerty »

icebraining wrote: post #138
Oletros wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are

No, they aren't. READ_CALENDAR is a separate permission from READ_CONTACTS.

You're correct that they are indeed separate permissions but I think when Google started putting them in buckets for displaying to the user they lumped the two together.

For instance on one address book app the website currently shows them asking for: Contacts/Calendar -read your contacts -modify your contacts

While the app on my phone says: Contacts -read your contacts -modify your contacts

According to Android Police an update earlier this month to the Play Store app appears to have separated them again: http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/12/06/apk-teardown-play-st...

Re: Android: I don't need your permission

#189

Post by TheQwerty »

mlrtime wrote: post #169
jbk wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

src/org/videolan/vlc/audio/AudioService.java

link to method (I think): https://github.com/mstorsjo/vlc-android/blob/master/vlc-andr...

Curiously, it looks like Google's AOSP music app requests READ_PHONE_STATE but unless I'm missing something they don't use it - relying entirely on focus loss instead. Granted, I'm not sure anything actually uses this code now...

https://github.com/android/platform_packages_apps_music

http://androidxref.com/5.0.0_r2/xref/packages/apps/Music/

Re: Android: I don't need your permission

#190

Post by wtbob »

9point6 wrote: post #166
wtbob wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't matter if contacts were encrypted client-side, but Google seen to have a severe allergy to client-side encryption. Mozilla are really leading the way on this issue. What I think is particularly sad is that Google could still make a huge amount of money without exposing one's private information directly.

Don't all the current nexus devices come with full-device encryption enabled?

Full-device encryption does nothing when data are transmitted off-device.

E.g., as long as my photos stay on my phone, they are encrypted, but if I back them up to Google+ then Google may read them.

Which is really pretty crazy: Google don't need to read those photos (or my contacts, or my documents); my computers need to, and the computers of those I share the photos with need to.

I could encrypt each photo with a unique key, and encrypt that key with my own private symmetric key, as well as my friends' public asymmetric keys, and then both they and I could view the photos at any time (our devices knowing how to access the keys we have authorised for them), but Google would not.

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