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Reading this article was infuriating - it treats apps as wholly sovereign entities, limited in what they do only by the promises of whichever startup developed
by car_analogy 4y ago
Reading this article was infuriating - it treats apps as wholly sovereign entities, limited in what they do only by the promises of whichever startup developed them, and that there is nothing else users can do to find out if an app is spying on them, or to stop it. The mention of permissions is brief and not expanded upon.
One would expect a tech-focused site to educate its readers better, e.g. explaining that an app without network permissions cannot spy on them (but may store data on their phone, in case it is searched..), and that there exist trustworthy free-software period-tracking apps, that aren't revenue-maximizing black-boxes.
The article seems designed to teach users helplessness.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago> (but may store data on their phone, in case it is searched..) Or other apps cooperate to exfiltrate.
- melony 4y agoOnly if you are on Android using the write to SD storage permission or if you explicitly enabled integration with third party services on iOS. By default the apps (on iOS at least) have their data rather tightly sandboxed.
- atoav 4y agoTightly enough for a state trojan used in investigating "murder"?
- melony 4y agoIf you have a state level adversary with easy access to zero days then all bets are off. There is no way to attain true security without formally verifying the entire software and hardware stack from the lowest level networking baseband to the userland applications. The alternative is to have a specialised airgapped hardware health tracker that is inaccessible without physical interaction.