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From my perspective it seems like Apple keeps releasing new privacy features and Android keeps being forced to catch up. What are the major privacy enhancements that Google has put out first?
I believe Android was the first to have fine grained app permissions where you could actually choose what an app has access to. iOS added that later.
In the beginning, Android showed you what an app could before you installed it, and it was an all-or-nothing approach – if you didn't want the app to do those things, your only choice was to not install it.
In the beginning, iOS didn't have this, and instead it prompted you for permission the first time an app wanted permission to do something. Additionally, app review had rules that apps had to operate correctly if you refused permission and that apps couldn’t ask for permissions irrelevant to what you are doing. So you can install an app, then pick and choose what you grant permission for.
Later, Android added the prompts to work the same as iOS. iOS hasn't changed to include the Android approach.
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People love to hate on Apple but the fact is, they continue to release features to better showcase or restrict developers that abuse your privacy. The "walled garden" also ensures they apply a ton of checks to apps to better restrict abuses. Sometimes it's overly sensitive and bad things happen, but in general it's awesome that over time it becomes harder and harder to get away with apps blatantly spying on you.
Android similarly has been continually improving the privacy/permissions model of the OS when it comes to third party apps. I am not sure that Apple has any obvious advantage in that department specifically.
That seems like an obvious advantage to me.
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I did that many years ago but with email... I sent a secret link from and to a microft email address and it was then accessed by a microsoft bot...
Of course, they inspect received/sent email for spam/antivirus purposes
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Yep, for Apollo app, it makes sense why he does it. But for other apps like TikTok, it makes no sense. I wonder if the app also sends the clipboard data after that. Someone should look into network requests being made.
TikTok also has web URLs that they could open in the app, as do many other apps.
iOS supports universal links, so a website and iOS application can indicate that when you open a link to the website but have the application installed, the application opens and takes you to the content. This is what TikTok can use to open links to TikTok in the application.
But this isn’t a general purpose website => app association. Only the website owner can allow an application to do this. You wouldn’t want, say, Google to set up their application to open DuckDuckGo URLs, for instance.
So when it comes to third-party Reddit clients, they can’t automatically open reddit.com URLs because they don’t own reddit.com. The clipboard trick is a workaround for that.
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> However, the android Citibank mobile app refuses to do anything useful if you don't give it access to your entire file system upfront. Considering Citi’s corporate culture, I’d attribute this to incompetence rather than malice or a desire to spy on users. I’ll bet they’re using a third-party anti-spyware library to examine the Android FS for keyloggers/etc to protect their users’ security. It’s well-intentioned, bu…
No, it’s because they like laundering money and the profit that brings, and hate any feature that might prove their wrongdoing empirically. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-citigroup-fine-idUSKBN1ET...
The $70m fine (a joke to a multi-billion-dollar company) is insignificant to the potential damages from a class-action lawsuit from a wide-ranging vulnerability in their online banking platform - hence their focus and over-engineering on their online banking security - while the risks from credit-card abuse and individual identity-theft are much more limited in scope - and are a known-quantity.
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This is a OS bug not an app bug. You can't expect millions of app developers to get this right. An app should not be allowed to read the clipboard until a user chooses to "paste". That's on the OS for allowing this behavior. It's silly to think that making it possible to read the clipboard at any time that some how all millions of app developers will use it correctly even if they have no malicious intent.
A high speed collision happens on a freeway, killing both drivers. This is a car manufacturer bug, not a human bug. You can't expect millions of drivers to get driving right. A car should not be allowed to drive fast. How about: stop apologizing for billion dollar corporations. Fault can be placed on both the OS and applications. I expect better, from everyone.
It seems like a ton of apps are abusing this feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRSWdtoUAjo I categorize this as another reason why "just trust us," just isn't acceptable enough when it comes to data privacy and ownership. Companies just cannot be trusted to treat their users' data with respect given the option of: profit or privacy. (sourced from reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/hejb9i/ios14_cat…
People love to hate on Apple but the fact is, they continue to release features to better showcase or restrict developers that abuse your privacy. The "walled garden" also ensures they apply a ton of checks to apps to better restrict abuses. Sometimes it's overly sensitive and bad things happen, but in general it's awesome that over time it becomes harder and harder to get away with apps blatantly spying on you.
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I'm not sure that looking at what a user is typing into the comment box for the application really qualifies as a significant privacy violation. That presumes a privacy model that isn't terribly intuitive or practical. Now, if they had evidence that the data from the keyboard was being sent up to a server, that'd be a different story.
In this case we're talking about apps monitoring the copy buffer when they aren't foregrounded. Your example of monitoring a comment box isn't what we're discussing. In the copy buffer example, I think a privacy model of "an app in the background can't read what I'm copy-pasting in other apps" seems very reasonable and fits my idea of what a "standard user" would expect. Personally, I would prefer a world where nothi…