Everyone knows all the apps on your phone • Hacker News Board

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#391

Post by pavel_lishin » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 5:32 PM UTC

__jonas wrote: post #308

_heimdall wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does El Salvador do gulags? I thought that was more of a Russian approach to imprisonment.

This is likely in reference to a recent deal the US (Trump) has made with El Salvador, allowing them to ship US citizens off to prisons in El Salvador, whether this is actually possible is not clear at this point though [1]. Here is some more information about the conditions in these prisons in El Salvador, CECOT being the most notable one: > Able to hold 40,000 inmates, the CECOT is made up of eight sprawling pavili…

> despite it not being a forced labor camp.

Well, not yet, anyway.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#392

Post by CharlesW » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 5:34 PM UTC

hk__2 wrote: post #211

WuxiFingerHold wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhones are less of a privacy nightmare. One of the biggest incentives for creating apps is to scrape all kind of data from the users. Look at how many apps require permission to see you contacts. And how many actually need your contacts to function. That's why I'm still a bit surprised that many seem to be surprised by findings like this one here.

> Look at how many apps require permission to see you contacts. It is so annoying that it’s either "give access to ALL my contacts and ALL their information (yes, even the notes I took on their favorite things for next Christmas)" or "don’t give access". I wish we could limit the number of contacts and the level of information we give.

> It is so annoying that it’s either "give access to ALL my contacts and ALL their information… […] I wish we could limit the number of contacts and the level of information we give.

iOS added fine-grained (at the contact level) access to contacts data last year.

https://lifehacker.com/tech/you-can-control-which-contacts-a...

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#393

Post by carlosjobim » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 5:40 PM UTC

mattl wrote: post #368

carlosjobim wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where most of the modern applications are either web wrappers or Electron apps. Only if you're stuck on a depreciated platform like Linux. If you are on Mac, native applications – real applications – are much more powerful and usable than any web wrapper on Linux. I've noticed Linux users have taken a habit of proposing their broken way of using a computer through the browser for other platforms as well. But on oth…

Good native Mac apps are on the decline too.

What are you missing?

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#394

Post by dataflow » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

schnatterer wrote: post #320

pava0 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "break open the app sandbox"?

I found this description about the security risks of rooting very eye-opening https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/android.html It also explains the sandbox.

That link seems to have... an agenda. It's way too hand-wavy (e.g., it doesn't at all attempt to tease out the nuance of whether a rooted phone inherently has a broken security boundary by design, or whether [like on Linux] it's secure as long as the implementation is non-buggy) and seems laser-focused on convincing users that desire sovereignty over their own devices that they might as well jump off a cliff.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#395

Post by sitkack » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #346

nodar86 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want any text to be selectable Disabling text selection is not just worse UX, it is actively user-hostile

I have literally never needed to select text in a UX element. In the past, occasionally there would be an error message in a message box dialog that I wanted to copy and paste. And then I discovered that despite it not looking selectable, it actually was. I don't want to accidentally select the text of my menu bar, or of a text box label, or a dialog tab title.

I, I, I. Empathy is a weakness.

Lots of limitations for you to not accidentally do something, maybe there is a way to not accidentally do those things and also help people that need them.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#396

Post by wruza » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

aucisson_masque wrote: post #371

That's why I like hacker news. I found this article yesterday and posted it on reddit android, here : https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1jmwg4w/everyone_k... 0 upvote, comment filled with what is either depressed sad people or just bots. Here it's top 2... With mostly interesting comment. Some subreddit are more dead than other but r/android got to be one of the worst.

Thread success is hit and miss. You can post and there's crickets, or you can post and people pile in. If you click the "past" link under the title, there's a thread from 2 days ago, completely dead.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#397

Post by throwaway290 » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

wkat4242 wrote: post #292

throwaway290 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you stop reading before the post got to the MAIN loophole that doesn't require the list of apps in the manifest? How does F-droid describe MAIN?

Yeah I did as the article was a bit long. But I'm sure this is detectable too as it must be in the manifest.

The article already showed it is detectable. But it is not detected by Google and I am unclear if F-Droid detects it either...

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#398

Post by diggan » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 5:46 PM UTC

aucisson_masque wrote: post #371

That's why I like hacker news. I found this article yesterday and posted it on reddit android, here : https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1jmwg4w/everyone_k... 0 upvote, comment filled with what is either depressed sad people or just bots. Here it's top 2... With mostly interesting comment. Some subreddit are more dead than other but r/android got to be one of the worst.

> Some subreddit are more dead than other but r/android got to be one of the worst.

Yeah, I'm not sure what exactly is going on with reddit but if dead-internet theory would hold anywhere, it seems to be there.

Besides, all the topic/subject subreddits seems moderated by people who hold a vested interest in the topic/subject, to the detriment of their community. I made a submission which went into details about the proprietary license that Meta's Llama is under, and what exactly that license means, and it was removed manually by the moderators of r/LocalLlama without any reasoning + they refuse to answer why it was removed even after trying to understand the rules of the subreddit better.

I'm guessing when the last "reddit purge" happened where they replaced a bunch of community moderators with employees from reddit, most of the platform was sold to companies to moderate their own spaces, unfortunately.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#399

Post by gtsop » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 5:56 PM UTC

turblety wrote: post #137

I still, will never understand the need for native "Apps". To this day, I have never seen an "App" that couldn't simply have been a website/webapp. Most of them would likely be improved by being a webapp. The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need. Yeah, they get to be on the "App Store". But the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept intr…

Very narrow take, it so far fetched i would consider this a bad faith comment.

How could you possibly consider intensive games to be "simply" web apps? How about network apps like vpns, wifi analyzers? Have you really not come across such apps or are we meant to think every app is a TODO application?

Both web and native has been driven by the same corporate forces, the argument here should be technical only - what can you do on native that you can't on the web. Mixing this technical matter with corporate policies muddies the waters.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#400

Post by tmtvl » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

nolist_policy wrote: post #295

tmtvl wrote: post #271

...On Android. I'm sure I don't have that problem on my Ubuntu Touch phone (if only because there are hardly any apps for it).

Interesting, how does Ubuntu Touch sandbox apps? Does it have one-time permissions (like Android)?

I actually don't know, I was just making a joke about the dearth of applications on UT. I'd expect it to have Snap-type sandboxing, but the Security and Privacy section of the settings app doesn't tell me much.