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Apple now requires user permission in iOS 6 before apps can access private data
- gte910h 14y agoAs an iPhone dev, I've wondered why they didn't do this since way back when they added GPS in 3.0 with its permission popup.
- cluda01 14y agoI think the reason for that is that people generally take an optimistic view of the world, e.g. "good things will usually happen." When smart phones came out your data was easily available. How many people at that time do you think shrugged it off with the excuse: "well, yeah, but I'm not doing anything wrong/who would care what I'm doing?" Now that people finally understand that this practice is very widespread and considered "normal" among a non-trivial amount of people in the technology space people naturally have become more protective of their information.
- adamjernst 14y agoAddress Book has always been a C API, not an Objective-C API, for legacy reasons. I suspect that had a lot to do with it.
- Smudge 14y ago> In iOS 6, the system now protects Calendars, Reminders, Contacts, and Photos as part of Apple’s data isolation privacy initiative. This shouldn't be an "initiative." This should have been a standard practice from day one.
- sp332 14y agoI think the idea was that you wouldn't install apps on your phone that you didn't trust. Obviously that didn't turn out to be practical so now they're adding more fine-grained control.
- Ralith 14y ago> the idea was that you wouldn't install apps on your phone that you didn't trust We've known this doesn't work out on PCs for years; why would phones be any different?
- blake8086 14y agoIt is easier to implement forgiveness than permission.
- Someone 14y agoThis phone has a much more restricted installation experience. There is only one installer, and Apple knows who to blame if any of the software it installs turns out to be malware. I think the idea was that that tractability would deter people from trying to put malware on the App Store. And that has worked reasonably well. Yes, there were several cases of apps that did not inform users that they uploaded data to implement features they advertised, but I am not aware of downright malware (say a fart app that uploads you address book to some server), and yes, Charlie Miller got a nefarious app on the App Store, but that malware was traceable back to him. The thing Apple did not think through well enough is the privacy issue. Users can feel uncomfortable about apps uploading their data, even if that is necessary to implement app functionality, because they may not trust the app writer to do nothing else with the data.
- lotu 14y agoAlso the personal information is more limited. At first the only "personal" information was my name and the name and phone numbers of my friends. This information is available (in theory) in a phone book.
- xtractinator 14y agoBecause Apple solves all the hardest problems.
- e40 14y agoLet's hope this goads Google to do the same thing in Android.
- timdorr 14y agoThey already do this to an extent with permissions. It's not as in-your-face about it, but it's certainly far more fine grained (read vs. write access, more services have permissions, etc.)
- Karunamon 14y agoI'd call it completely the opposite of fine grained. You can't, for instance, restrict an individual app's access to the calendar. You're shown what permissions an app wants on install, but you can't revoke individual ones. You're stuck taking or leaving it.
- laconian 14y agoImagine how that would make life for developers, forced to deal with the combinatorial explosion of revoked permissions.
- Karunamon 14y agoYou mean exactly like how it's going to be on iOS when 6 lands? Developers are smart. They'll engineer their apps to live if permission is revoked.