5 ms·

I think Spotify guy is right. If you give photos access to twitter, it is not much of a stretch to give it to the Music app. The problem is the way permissions

by lqdc13 11y ago

I think Spotify guy is right. If you give photos access to twitter, it is not much of a stretch to give it to the Music app. The problem is the way permissions work. You should be able to give temporary individual permissions to each app for each service to only a portion of your storage. For example, not all photos forever, but just these photos. The way the permissions currently work on Android is insane. It is also insane that people are okay with sharing all of this information with facebook, twitter, verizon, google, lyft, uber, yelp and 50 other apps.

masklinn 11y ago
> The problem is the way permissions work. You should be able to give temporary individual permissions to each app for each service to only a portion of your storage. For example, not all photos forever, but just these photos. That is much better handled by dedicated pickers running in isolated processes which can give temporary access to explicitly selected datasets without the application having any access rights to even those data in the long term. Surely Android has some sort of media picker intent which lets users select media without giving applications "background access" to all your media library, no? Unless the application is image edition software, I see no reason for it to get any passive access to the user's images.
- lqdc13 11y ago
  Pretty sure they can get the photos whenever they want once you have the app installed and running in the background. Otherwise, how would automatic photos backup work? I haven't written any Android apps though so I don't know the details.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    > Pretty sure they can get the photos whenever they want once you have the app installed and running in the background. If it has permissions to access all files at any time sure, point is there's no reason for the application to have that, and it's an opt-in.
    - lqdc13 11y ago
      Yeah, I agree with you. However, it is always a trade-off between usability and security.
jbb555 11y ago
It's not the app permissions that are the problem, it's the attitude of the licence which is basically we'll help ourself to whatever personal data we feel like and do whatever we like with it.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
Google's OS permissions were designed to serve Google, not the end user.
RGamma 11y ago
Interestingly on virtually all home computers the situation with access control to certain APIs and data is _way_ worse (because basically nobody (I know you're out there SELinux/AppArmor/grsecurity/etc users) uses it to the extent that would be necessary to provide even basic privacy protection or system security). I do hope that, when application sandboxing goes mainstream, it is not only going to be used to mitigate dependency hell, but also to provide a nice and featureful (and usable!) interface for filesystem/networking/etc isolation and monitoring with white/black/greylisting and fake permissions (i.e. pretend an application has a permission and return made-up data). Heck, it'd probably be best to make full isolation of every executable the default and selectively introduce (fake) permissions, such that it just gets the minimum that is needed/desired.
- lqdc13 11y ago
  Cyanogen mod let you give fake permissions for 2 years now. That fixes some of the problems.
- throwaway7767 11y ago
  I'm a big fan of the Qubes OS project, and I think they're on the right track there: https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/ Basically, have the desktop environment running in a non-network-connected machine, and have different VMs for different purposes with application windows seamlessly appearing on the desktop. If I have a spotify VM (or even listen in a disposable-removed-on-close VM), there's nothing for them to access. EDIT: Not saying this is for everyone. At this point I would not let my grandmother use it. But I can see the concept becoming very easy to use.

by lqdc13 11y ago

masklinn 11y ago

> The problem is the way permissions work. You should be able to give temporary individual permissions to each app for each service to only a portion of your storage. For example, not all photos forever, but just these photos. That is much better handled by dedicated pickers running in isolated processes which can give temporary access to explicitly selected datasets without the application having any access rights to even those data in the long term. Surely Android has some sort of media picker intent which lets users select media without giving applications "background access" to all your media library, no? Unless the application is image edition software, I see no reason for it to get any passive access to the user's images.

lqdc13 11y ago
Pretty sure they can get the photos whenever they want once you have the app installed and running in the background. Otherwise, how would automatic photos backup work? I haven't written any Android apps though so I don't know the details.
- masklinn 11y ago
  > Pretty sure they can get the photos whenever they want once you have the app installed and running in the background. If it has permissions to access all files at any time sure, point is there's no reason for the application to have that, and it's an opt-in.
  - lqdc13 11y ago
    Yeah, I agree with you. However, it is always a trade-off between usability and security.

jbb555 11y ago

It's not the app permissions that are the problem, it's the attitude of the licence which is basically we'll help ourself to whatever personal data we feel like and do whatever we like with it.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

AdmiralAsshat 11y ago

Google's OS permissions were designed to serve Google, not the end user.

RGamma 11y ago

Interestingly on virtually all home computers the situation with access control to certain APIs and data is _way_ worse (because basically nobody (I know you're out there SELinux/AppArmor/grsecurity/etc users) uses it to the extent that would be necessary to provide even basic privacy protection or system security). I do hope that, when application sandboxing goes mainstream, it is not only going to be used to mitigate dependency hell, but also to provide a nice and featureful (and usable!) interface for filesystem/networking/etc isolation and monitoring with white/black/greylisting and fake permissions (i.e. pretend an application has a permission and return made-up data). Heck, it'd probably be best to make full isolation of every executable the default and selectively introduce (fake) permissions, such that it just gets the minimum that is needed/desired.

lqdc13 11y ago
Cyanogen mod let you give fake permissions for 2 years now. That fixes some of the problems.
throwaway7767 11y ago
I'm a big fan of the Qubes OS project, and I think they're on the right track there: https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/ Basically, have the desktop environment running in a non-network-connected machine, and have different VMs for different purposes with application windows seamlessly appearing on the desktop. If I have a spotify VM (or even listen in a disposable-removed-on-close VM), there's nothing for them to access. EDIT: Not saying this is for everyone. At this point I would not let my grandmother use it. But I can see the concept becoming very easy to use.