3 ms·
People always cite sandboxing as some kind of panacea but the problem is sandboxing is entirely incapable of preventing bad actors from abusing permissions that
by nodamage 5y ago
People always cite sandboxing as some kind of panacea but the problem is sandboxing is entirely incapable of preventing bad actors from abusing permissions that were originally granted for legitimate purposes.
For example: I might be okay with granting a messaging app access to my contacts to make it easier for me to send messages to people, but that doesn't mean I'm okay with that app exfiltrating my contacts to build a shadow graph of my social network to sell to advertisers.
Putting a permissions dialog in front of my contacts only solves the problem of whether an app is allowed to access my contacts in the first place, there are zero restrictions on what can be done with that data once access is granted.
- heavyset_go 5y ago> For example: I might be okay with granting a messaging app access to my contacts to make it easier for me to send messages to people, but that doesn't mean I'm okay with that app exfiltrating my contacts to build a shadow graph of my social network to sell to advertisers. > Putting a permissions dialog in front of my contacts only solves the problem of whether an app is allowed to access my contacts in the first place, there are zero restrictions on what can be done with that data once access is granted. There's no reason that sandboxes have to be so lenient that this is possible. Permissions can be fine grained, and network connections can be filtered, restricted and denied. Contact access doesn't have to be black or white, either. On systems that work for the user, you can even feed dummy data to apps if you want to.
- nodamage 5y agoI'm sorry but I don't see how any of that actually solves the underlying problem of granting a third-party access to data you don't want to see abused.