5 ms·

This is completely pointless if they don't also fix the (very deliberate) permission problems. For example, a lot of innocent operations such as connecting to

by zibzab 5y ago

This is completely pointless if they don't also fix the (very deliberate) permission problems. For example, a lot of innocent operations such as connecting to your headphones have been tied to locations services. Google has been abusing this to extreme lengths to extract exact user location for years now.

oauea 5y ago
Connecting to your headphones requires bluetooth. Getting access to bluetooth means you can scan for nearby bluetooth devices. This may leak your location if identifiable bluetooth beacons are nearby. Hence, you need location access. iOS is similar. But they do not give apps access to the mac address of scanned bluetooth devices which makes the platform borderline unusable for actual bluetooth apps.
- Saris 5y ago
  The problem is the permissions for bluetooth are lumped in with fine GPS location permissions.
  - TurningCanadian 5y ago
    They're lumped together correctly. If you allow bluetooth access, the nearby bluetooth MAC addresses could be used to identify your location with near-GPS precision.
    - giaour 5y ago
      Or greater precision! GPS (at least as used on most phones) has a ~6 foot margin of error.
    - Saris 5y ago
      Fair enough, as long as those nearby devices have very precisely known locations in some database. But there's also the factor of battery usage, I'd like to be able to allow bluetooth but deny GPS hardware access for those occasional apps that like to trigger the GPS constantly for no good reason.
- DisjointedHunt 5y ago
  iOS is more scary. They don’t give apps the permission, but make no such restrictions on their internal services for analytics/competitor research/private APIs I’ve dug in much detail through what iOS makes available in the data takeout request on the Apple account level and I find it impossible to believe they include everything they have through iOS at the moment.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  The issue with Android is broad permissions. This is how dictator works; make a broad rule and harm everyone. We should abhor such malpractices. They should have just made separate permission for bluetooth.
- zibzab 5y ago
  This the apology I usually hear, and it is no longer true! Google has with every android release pushed this a bit further. In Android 12 it demands (1) background (2) precise positioning and (3) a GPS position lock. Note also that "Bluetooth may leak your location" is actually due to this very type of data gathering.
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    "Bluetooth may leak your location" is not a result of this. It's the result of the increasingly widespread prevalence of bluetooth location devices. That is, bluetooth modules whose sole purpose it to be location beacons that can be looked up ( eg https://www.inpixon.com/technology/standards/bluetooth-low-energy https://www.inpixon.com/technology/standards/bluetooth-low-e... ). See also the massive amount of bluetooth tags these days from Tile, AirTags, etc... Android didn't used to require precise location to access bluetooth. This permission got "coarser" over time as the result of people using bluetooth specifically for location. And you'll note that Google / Pixel don't make any bluetooth tracking beacons. They didn't make this mess, they just reacted to it. The reality is letting an app scan for bluetooth means it can probably get your precise location in a non-trivial amount of places. Same as letting an app scan for wifi.
  - izacus 5y ago
    > Google has with every android release pushed this a bit further. In Android 12 it demands (1) background (2) precise positioning and (3) a GPS position lock. This is not true. At all.
gruez 5y ago
>For example, a lot of innocent operations such as connecting to your headphones have been tied to locations services This is a non-issue for me. The last time I had to do that (to get a bluetooth headphone companion app to work), I disabled wifi and location, enabled bluetooth, opened the app, granted it location permissions, and connected to the bluetooth headset. Afterwards I revoked location permissions and reenabled location/wifi, but the app still worked.
- zibzab 5y ago
  1. How does that make it any better? You didn't want to provide your location, you were strong armed into doing it once and that's okay? 2. If you are using an app for device management (e.g. Google Home, Samsung Wear) it will be started next time you connect and then it's permission-madness all over again.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > 1. How does that make it any better? You didn't want to provide your location, you were strong armed into doing it once and that's okay? As other commenters have mentioned, allowing bluetooth access also potentially leaks your location. The alternative of not asking for permission isn't exactly better either. Therefore it's hard to characterize this as some sort of nefarious attempt by google to coax location information from you. >2. If you are using an app for device management (e.g. Google Home, Samsung Wear) it will be started next time you connect and then it's permission-madness all over again. I'm not sure how other apps work, but for the companion app I was using it continued to work afterwards, even with location permission denied. This persists across app closes and device restarts.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Imagine the masses of average users having to put up with that.
  - JaggedJax 5y ago
    As of Android 11, Google actually made this flow easy. Right next to the allow option is an "Only this time" option.
xg15 5y ago
I heard that argument a lot, but I still don't quite get it. If you have (stock) Android, then Google has root on your phone. They don't need to hide loopholes for themselves inside the permission system, because they are not bound by it anyway. Or did I miss something? I think you are still right that the permissions are way too coarse-grained or have weird associations. But it seems to me, they at least partially improved the situation by switching to an ask-on-first-use model. Of course it might still be that Google is keeping the permissions deliberately coarse to secretly help third parties with data mining. That would be sort of the same spirit as the whole "privacy sandbox" stuff.
- zibzab 5y ago
  As a user, you can decide to never enable GPS. This scheme forces you to enable it for reasons completely unrelated to your usage.
  - xg15 5y ago
    This is true - but my point was that this doesn't influece Google's ability to track your location in the slightest. Google could design the most privacy-conscious, user friendly permission system, make it super easy to disable location without any side effects - and still have the OS or Google Play Services or whatever else completely ignore the setting and track you anyway.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    > As a user, you can decide to never enable GPS. As a user you can decide this if you never use programms which need access to location, navigation programs, for example. If you look a bit further you will notice that there are a lot of google programs which have access to location like Google play games or google play music or messages etc. There are also some "system" programs for which you cannot disable location access.
- wzdd 5y ago
  A loophole is useful in the scenario that Google wants the good PR of being seen as as privacy-focused by restricting location tracking, even to itself, but still wants to collect as much location data as it can. That said, I don't believe this is what's happening for the headphone pairing case. It's easier and likely more fruitful to limit functionality of popular apps unless fine grained location and is enabled and you are logged in to your Google account, which is what I believe they do with Maps.
jcranberry 5y ago
One of the features of this proposal is to sandbox advertising SDKs into separate binaries submitted to the app store, which run in a separate process (one instance per app without app-to-app communication allowed) with its own permissions, storage space, and which is only allowed to execute code from the apk. So that would help.
- lewantmontreal 5y ago
  Sounds nice. I’m hoping android becomes a reasonable option once my old SE finally dies. The new SE phones are huge and iPhone Minis are in constant rumors of getting cancelled. Android likely has more options for small size phones.
  - idle_zealot 5y ago
    > Android likely has more options for small size phones. I wish. The only phones you can get that are of a similar or smaller size to an iPhone Mini are unsupported Chinese gimmick phones or quite old. The smallest Android that still gets support is the Pixel 4a (NOT the Pixel 4a 5g, which is much larger), and that is approaching the end of its support window.
izacus 5y ago
This was fixed with Android 12 and now has a separate permission. (Although, that permission will also allow everyone to see your location due to how Bluetooth works, but apparently being notified of this fact annoyed you people so much that it's fine to ignore on both iOS and Android. But there's nothing "innocent" at allowing bluetooth scans - it DOES expose your location like the permission said before.)
- urdinak 5y ago
  This is true. There is however, a way to explicitly state that the app does not use the bluetooth scans for location: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/bluetooth/permissions#assert-never-for-location https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/blue... However, this would depend on the good will of the developer, as the end-user does not know whether this flag is set or not -- as far as I can tell.

by zibzab 5y ago

oauea 5y ago

Connecting to your headphones requires bluetooth. Getting access to bluetooth means you can scan for nearby bluetooth devices. This may leak your location if identifiable bluetooth beacons are nearby. Hence, you need location access. iOS is similar. But they do not give apps access to the mac address of scanned bluetooth devices which makes the platform borderline unusable for actual bluetooth apps.

Saris 5y ago
The problem is the permissions for bluetooth are lumped in with fine GPS location permissions.
- TurningCanadian 5y ago
  They're lumped together correctly. If you allow bluetooth access, the nearby bluetooth MAC addresses could be used to identify your location with near-GPS precision.
  - giaour 5y ago
    Or greater precision! GPS (at least as used on most phones) has a ~6 foot margin of error.
  - Saris 5y ago
    Fair enough, as long as those nearby devices have very precisely known locations in some database. But there's also the factor of battery usage, I'd like to be able to allow bluetooth but deny GPS hardware access for those occasional apps that like to trigger the GPS constantly for no good reason.
DisjointedHunt 5y ago
iOS is more scary. They don’t give apps the permission, but make no such restrictions on their internal services for analytics/competitor research/private APIs I’ve dug in much detail through what iOS makes available in the data takeout request on the Apple account level and I find it impossible to believe they include everything they have through iOS at the moment.
cute_boi 5y ago
The issue with Android is broad permissions. This is how dictator works; make a broad rule and harm everyone. We should abhor such malpractices. They should have just made separate permission for bluetooth.
zibzab 5y ago
This the apology I usually hear, and it is no longer true! Google has with every android release pushed this a bit further. In Android 12 it demands (1) background (2) precise positioning and (3) a GPS position lock. Note also that "Bluetooth may leak your location" is actually due to this very type of data gathering.
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  "Bluetooth may leak your location" is not a result of this. It's the result of the increasingly widespread prevalence of bluetooth location devices. That is, bluetooth modules whose sole purpose it to be location beacons that can be looked up ( eg https://www.inpixon.com/technology/standards/bluetooth-low-energy https://www.inpixon.com/technology/standards/bluetooth-low-e... ). See also the massive amount of bluetooth tags these days from Tile, AirTags, etc... Android didn't used to require precise location to access bluetooth. This permission got "coarser" over time as the result of people using bluetooth specifically for location. And you'll note that Google / Pixel don't make any bluetooth tracking beacons. They didn't make this mess, they just reacted to it. The reality is letting an app scan for bluetooth means it can probably get your precise location in a non-trivial amount of places. Same as letting an app scan for wifi.
- izacus 5y ago
  > Google has with every android release pushed this a bit further. In Android 12 it demands (1) background (2) precise positioning and (3) a GPS position lock. This is not true. At all.

gruez 5y ago

>For example, a lot of innocent operations such as connecting to your headphones have been tied to locations services This is a non-issue for me. The last time I had to do that (to get a bluetooth headphone companion app to work), I disabled wifi and location, enabled bluetooth, opened the app, granted it location permissions, and connected to the bluetooth headset. Afterwards I revoked location permissions and reenabled location/wifi, but the app still worked.

zibzab 5y ago
1. How does that make it any better? You didn't want to provide your location, you were strong armed into doing it once and that's okay? 2. If you are using an app for device management (e.g. Google Home, Samsung Wear) it will be started next time you connect and then it's permission-madness all over again.
- gruez 5y ago
  > 1. How does that make it any better? You didn't want to provide your location, you were strong armed into doing it once and that's okay? As other commenters have mentioned, allowing bluetooth access also potentially leaks your location. The alternative of not asking for permission isn't exactly better either. Therefore it's hard to characterize this as some sort of nefarious attempt by google to coax location information from you. >2. If you are using an app for device management (e.g. Google Home, Samsung Wear) it will be started next time you connect and then it's permission-madness all over again. I'm not sure how other apps work, but for the companion app I was using it continued to work afterwards, even with location permission denied. This persists across app closes and device restarts.
Apocryphon 5y ago
Imagine the masses of average users having to put up with that.
- JaggedJax 5y ago
  As of Android 11, Google actually made this flow easy. Right next to the allow option is an "Only this time" option.

xg15 5y ago

I heard that argument a lot, but I still don't quite get it. If you have (stock) Android, then Google has root on your phone. They don't need to hide loopholes for themselves inside the permission system, because they are not bound by it anyway. Or did I miss something? I think you are still right that the permissions are way too coarse-grained or have weird associations. But it seems to me, they at least partially improved the situation by switching to an ask-on-first-use model. Of course it might still be that Google is keeping the permissions deliberately coarse to secretly help third parties with data mining. That would be sort of the same spirit as the whole "privacy sandbox" stuff.

zibzab 5y ago
As a user, you can decide to never enable GPS. This scheme forces you to enable it for reasons completely unrelated to your usage.
- xg15 5y ago
  This is true - but my point was that this doesn't influece Google's ability to track your location in the slightest. Google could design the most privacy-conscious, user friendly permission system, make it super easy to disable location without any side effects - and still have the OS or Google Play Services or whatever else completely ignore the setting and track you anyway.
- hulitu 5y ago
  > As a user, you can decide to never enable GPS. As a user you can decide this if you never use programms which need access to location, navigation programs, for example. If you look a bit further you will notice that there are a lot of google programs which have access to location like Google play games or google play music or messages etc. There are also some "system" programs for which you cannot disable location access.
wzdd 5y ago
A loophole is useful in the scenario that Google wants the good PR of being seen as as privacy-focused by restricting location tracking, even to itself, but still wants to collect as much location data as it can. That said, I don't believe this is what's happening for the headphone pairing case. It's easier and likely more fruitful to limit functionality of popular apps unless fine grained location and is enabled and you are logged in to your Google account, which is what I believe they do with Maps.

jcranberry 5y ago

One of the features of this proposal is to sandbox advertising SDKs into separate binaries submitted to the app store, which run in a separate process (one instance per app without app-to-app communication allowed) with its own permissions, storage space, and which is only allowed to execute code from the apk. So that would help.

lewantmontreal 5y ago
Sounds nice. I’m hoping android becomes a reasonable option once my old SE finally dies. The new SE phones are huge and iPhone Minis are in constant rumors of getting cancelled. Android likely has more options for small size phones.
- idle_zealot 5y ago
  > Android likely has more options for small size phones. I wish. The only phones you can get that are of a similar or smaller size to an iPhone Mini are unsupported Chinese gimmick phones or quite old. The smallest Android that still gets support is the Pixel 4a (NOT the Pixel 4a 5g, which is much larger), and that is approaching the end of its support window.

izacus 5y ago

This was fixed with Android 12 and now has a separate permission. (Although, that permission will also allow everyone to see your location due to how Bluetooth works, but apparently being notified of this fact annoyed you people so much that it's fine to ignore on both iOS and Android. But there's nothing "innocent" at allowing bluetooth scans - it DOES expose your location like the permission said before.)

urdinak 5y ago
This is true. There is however, a way to explicitly state that the app does not use the bluetooth scans for location: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/bluetooth/permissions#assert-never-for-location https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/blue... However, this would depend on the good will of the developer, as the end-user does not know whether this flag is set or not -- as far as I can tell.