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The thing is, that Android permissions don't really map to user privacy in a way that's useful, and definitely not in a way that makes sense to users; simply li
by anaisbetts 4y ago
The thing is, that Android permissions don't really map to user privacy in a way that's useful, and definitely not in a way that makes sense to users; simply listing them is actively misleading.
For example, every app gets INTERNET by default, meaning that lots of privacy-violating things don't have to be declared at all! Other permissions like ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION being required until recently for accessing Bluetooth devices meant that users would think that every BLE app was spying on them. People don't understand the implications of what a permission means for their data / privacy
A developer-written description of exactly what an app is doing with user data and why is much better (with of course the issue that developers can simply lie)
- politelemon 4y ago> with of course the issue that developers can simply lie And not something that should be hand waved away in the quest to say that written descriptions are better. They are not, but having both in other can help to a great extent. A practice I've rarely seen is the description containing each permission name, and what it's needed for, in other words, explaining that mapping that's missing.
- dundarious 4y agoYes, because they can lie, and because given how the Play store operates, Google is probably going to be worse than Apple at detecting lies, it’s nice to see permissions because they function as an upper bound on the extent of the lie. And while there are issues with using permissions for this because they are not always easy to interpret, they often are, so the benefit is clear.
- cptskippy 4y agoI want the programmatically generated list of permissions. I want those permissions to be more granular, not less. I want the developer to explain why they're using each permission.
- pydry 4y ago>Other permissions like ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION being required until recently for accessing Bluetooth devices meant that users would think that every BLE app was spying on them. This was a dumb hack by Google. "BLE can be used to spy on your location" => "you must grant all location data to said app". This is something that is better dealt with a clear privacy warning next to the actually relevant permission rather than conflating it with GPS.
- tesseract 4y agoAnd of course what users generally really care about is "does this app upload my location to somewhere? continuously or only when I take a specific action?" but permissions of that type are basically impossible to enforce by technical measures.
- pydry 4y agoI care about risks. The problem is that when the risks are complicated and google tries to dumb it down or hide information to simplify it they inadvertently make it more complicated and stupid at the same time. I'd rather they just put all the information out there on full display and maybe create an API that lets apps compete over explaining it clearly/warning users.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]