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The truly rotten egg here is Android (and Google by extension). Why a user cannot elect to nominally provide permissions to an app, but restrict the content of
by smegel 11y ago
The truly rotten egg here is Android (and Google by extension).
Why a user cannot elect to nominally provide permissions to an app, but restrict the content of different grants (so an app may see an empty phone book by default or an empty Pictures folder) is beyond me. It borders on abusive.
- mcintyre1994 11y agoNo excuse for the ridiculous time it's taken, but this is coming in M.
- MatekCopatek 11y agoIs it really? I know they would allow you to specify the permissions yourself, but i think the guy above you is talking about "fake" permissions (the app "sees" your emails, but there are none)
- tokenizerrr 11y agoYou cannot do any of that on a computer either. As far as I know neither Windows, Mac and Linux have any kind of permission system for the applications they run. Sure, you can hack something together using sandboxing/containers/VMs, but none of the operating systems provide this by default. There have been alternate Android roms which provide the features you speak of, as well.
- wes-exp 11y ago> neither Windows, Mac and Linux have any kind of permission system Actually, OS X now has the beginnings of an iOS-like permission system for location services and access to your contacts.
- bariumbitmap 11y agoFreeBSD jails? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail Also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating-system-level_virtualization#Implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating-system-level_virtual...
- tokenizerrr 11y agoThis is not a user-facing permission system. When double-clicking a binary I do not get to pick and choose which files it gets to access, if it gets to access my webcam or not, etc. Like I said in my third sentence: > Sure, you can hack something together using sandboxing/containers/VMs, but none of the operating systems provide this by default There I meant a fully fledged user-facing permission system with 'this'.
- aikah 11y agoApps that extract random infos from computers without user's consent are considered spywares and can be blocked with an anti-virus.
- tokenizerrr 11y agoAnti-virus only blocks things it knows about, by preventing you from running it or killing if it is running. They're hardly as effective as the vendors want you to believe.
- shock 11y agoThat's not strictly true on Linux: you could use AppArmor/SELinux to remove capabilities from programs. Surely not as user friendly as they could be but the capability is there.
- tokenizerrr 11y agoYou can do that, but there is no way for an application to "ask" access to anything. You need to fully know how the application works, where it wants to read/write etc. I consider this under the hacking something together using 'sandboxing' portion of my post, since it's not something that will work for your regular user. (Don't get me wrong, I think it's awesome but sadly not the same as a permission system)
- WorldWideWayne 11y agoSo what? We shouldn't fix something in Android because desktop operating systems don't have the same problem? That doesn't make any sense at all.
- tokenizerrr 11y agoThat isn't what I was saying at all. Sure, it should be fixed. But you shouldn't shame it for not having it.
- WorldWideWayne 11y agoYes, you should. You're saying exactly this - "You should live with some bad implementation because things are bad elsewhere."
- tokenizerrr 11y agoYes, you should live with it, and you are. Meanwhile alternative ROMs exist if you really care, and a better implementation for stock android is in the works. Meanwhile most/all desktop operating systems are in an even worse shape, and no one is complaining about that or calling it a rotten egg. Talk about hypocrisy.
- WorldWideWayne 11y agoWell nobody here seems to agree with you.
- tokenizerrr 11y agoAnd that's all that matters in this world, right? It's disappointing to see people use the downvote button as a disagree button, though.
- WorldWideWayne 11y ago
- smegel 11y agoMy firewall can stop them talking to the Internet. I often use VirtualBox to run new downloads in isolation, sometimes with a VPN running as well. And who installs apps on their PC anymore, maybe after your initial setup? The point is you install apps you know and trust. I don't think notepad++ is uploading my photo library somewhere. And there's a word for PC apps that do the wrong thing: (ad/mal/crap)ware. It's one of the reasons I do as much online in a webbrowser as possible - its a hellla lot more secure than downloading and installing stuff all the time.
- ultramancool 11y agoA lot of people have suggested this and I would really like it too, but the thing is that this makes things extremely difficult or annoying for users and any novice will just accept all the alerts they get, defeating the entire purpose. More advanced people can use XPrivacy or similar: http://repo.xposed.info/module/biz.bokhorst.xprivacy http://repo.xposed.info/module/biz.bokhorst.xprivacy
- RGamma 11y agoI see this (fake permissions) as a pretty crucial feature. Let lusers be lusers and provide functionality to those who will appreciate it.
- Benjamin_Dobell 11y agoAndroid 6.0 has the ability to enable/disable individual permissions. Apps running on Android 6, but not compiled against the Android 6 SDK, end up with similar behaviour to what you described i.e. If you disable access to your contacts, the OS just reports back you have zero contacts etc.