31–40 of 91 posts
That's annoying. But an app that's more intrusive in my mind is the Flickr app which sends your Geo location back to Flickr every single damn time you exit any camera on your Android phone. Even if you haven't launched Flickr in weeks/months. It's done this for as long as I've been monitoring the apps on my phone (a good year now). I started using LBE to selectively block security requests by apps last Summer after b…
Surveillance isn't cool. You know what's cool? Privacy.
Much better is the iOS model where there are a select few extra-sensitive permissions that cause a popup when the app requests it and lets the user decide if they're going to grant it at runtime, not install time. That lets the user know what triggered the request and decide if it's legitimate. It also allows them to continue using an app even if they don't want to share their location or whatever.
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I supposed I could have googled it to find out, but I've certainly never had a carrier tell me in advance what apps would be on my phone. Perhaps it's buried in the fine print that I agreed to without reading, but honestly I doubt it.
Every Smartphone comes with certain pre-installed apps that you might not necessarily desire. But facebook certainly never was one of them. At least none of the Samsung series comes with it.
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Everyone is focusing on FB but the bigger problem is that any app can probably take your phone number without permission. Paging Al Franken.
Actually, when you install an application you accept the READ_PHONE_STATE permission. So you're explicitly giving them permission to take your phone number. This doesn't really apply to pre-installed applications, but there's really no argument that they're doing it without your consent if you download the application from the Play Store.
This is pretty standard in Android apps for analytics tracking to use the phone number, IMEI or other values. A while back, a few production phones shipped where Settings.Secure.ANDROID_ID returned invalid values (null, the same value for all devices of that model, etc). This is the reason that most apps you come across ask for the READ_PHONE_STATE permission.
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Actually, when you install an application you accept the READ_PHONE_STATE permission. So you're explicitly giving them permission to take your phone number. This doesn't really apply to pre-installed applications, but there's really no argument that they're doing it without your consent if you download the application from the Play Store.
There is an argument, because normal people don't know what the hell a READ_PHONE_STATE is.
That's annoying. But an app that's more intrusive in my mind is the Flickr app which sends your Geo location back to Flickr every single damn time you exit any camera on your Android phone. Even if you haven't launched Flickr in weeks/months. It's done this for as long as I've been monitoring the apps on my phone (a good year now). I started using LBE to selectively block security requests by apps last Summer after b…
what if you don't have your gps on?