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I believe there must be more to this story. Maybe it is possible to abuse multicast for tracking/fingerprinting in some way and that's why Apple is locking it
by jannes 5y ago
I believe there must be more to this story.
Maybe it is possible to abuse multicast for tracking/fingerprinting in some way and that's why Apple is locking it down to approved apps.
It would have been unfeasible to show a permission dialog. How would you even begin to explain multicast to the average user in 1-2 sentences?
- Daniel_sk 5y agoWell it can certainly help the app to get a coarse location - if it matches an existing network fingerprint (when you visit back the same network or it was scanned by other user before). This is also why you need location permissions on Android for Bluetooth or Wifi direct access.
- simondotau 5y agoCould it be used by apps to communicate with other apps on the same device?
- neilalexander 5y agoYou can do this without multicast, at least for the period of time that the listening app is allowed to run in the background (around a couple minutes, unless there are other entitlements at play), by just listening for connections on the loopback address using a regular socket.
- pja 5y agoYou’d probably just call it “local network access” or something similar. Most people are not running local DNS services which a device without this permission could use to probe the local network, so it’s a fairly accurate description for the majority of users I would think?
- Ensorceled 5y agoI'm pretty sure my mother would have to ask me what “local network access” meant. Also, there is nothing mom would install that would legitimately require this permission ...
- dathinab 5y agomulticast => communicate and find devices on your local network I guess one sentence is enough ;=) (Sure it's not perfect in it's explanation, but that's basically what it boils down to in it's usage.)