> In most cases, granting permission is an all-or-nothing affair. This means you cannot cherry-pick the permissions to grant or deny when installing an app. You

> In most cases, granting permission is an all-or-nothing affair. This means you cannot cherry-pick the permissions to grant or deny when installing an app. You either accept or decline. I wish the author had spent a few lines to expand on this one so people would understand it better. This is a huge problem for those using older Android phones (which is a huge number worldwide) with Android 5 and below. With Android 6 (Marshmallow) and beyond, one can control specific permissions post app install (whereas the "all or nothing at installation" model applies to lower versions). AFAIK, this is also a problem on Windows phones, but that's quite a small percentage comparatively. Those using iOS devices haven't had this issue for a long time because app permissions are granted or denied individually at runtime (this has also improved over time) and not during installation. > The choices here involve four things: >... > Switch to secured and private decentralized social networks The author mentions Nexus Social, but it still seems like it'll have decentralized storage only later next year. As of now, I don't know of any Facebook or Google+ replacements that are decentralized and help control/preserve privacy. There are simpler platforms to replace Twitter, like Mastodon. But a text-only platform will always remain a niche as far as social networking is concerned. We live in the age of memes, live videos and clips. I personally would love to see a decentralized, feature rich and easy to use platform that preserves and allows control of privacy by the users (from others and the network), but at this point in time I don't have much hope for the next several years.