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Why do we have to give access to our entire hard-drive to share one file once? How is it legal for someone else to give away your phone number, your addresses f
by thinkloop 6y ago
Why do we have to give access to our entire hard-drive to share one file once? How is it legal for someone else to give away your phone number, your addresses for the last 30 years, your email addresses, and the rest of your personal contact information, along with all the contact information of everyone else they ever met to any app they like? Why can apps run your mic and camera 24 hours a day in the background because you wanted to record a gif once? Why should an app be able to read every sms for all eternity because they wanted to verify your phone number once?
Ungoogling is a fine step but the whole thing needs to be rebuilt:
- Sharing Contacts: Should be illegal and removed as an option. Apps shouldn't be able to trick/coerce/incentivise people to harvest and sell other people's private information. When people give out their phone numbers and addresses they do it with some expectation of care, not with the intention of having it immedietly uploaded to Flappy Bird. The most that should be allowed is perhaps some sort of hash of contacts to be able to bootstrap some friend graph, but that's it.
- Sharing Files: There should be a single general default "file manager" app that acts as the intermediary between your files, and other apps, giving them only the files they need for the specific task at hand. Permission for the filemanagers themselves can be given with multiple ALL CAPS permission warnings not to do it.
- Camera/Mic/Location: Trusted intermediate app should capture and provide the data needed for the task at hand. At the absolute minimum, permissions should default to only recording while the app is open (like android location now). Persistent background recording should only be allowed after multiple ALL CAPS stern warnings and suggestion to reject unless absolutely necessary.
- SMS/etc: Have intermediate trusted apps select and share the specific messages you need to share for the task at hand.
In short, data access should be handled by few, trusted, vetted, intermediary apps, with heavily gated permissions for those apps themsevles; and sharing other people's private contact information should be illegal.
- contingencies 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625015
- Tijdreiziger 6y ago> android.permission.DVB_DEVICE DVB as in the Digital Video Broadcasting standard? I'm surprised Android has a specific permission for this.
- heavyset_go 6y agoAndroid runs on set-top boxes, so it makes sense.
- lifty 6y agoWhat we need is a capability based security system implemented in the OS, which is not easy to implement. iOS is going in the right direction.
- als0 6y agoFuschia as well. Looks like a good foundation for the future of Android.
- TheCraiggers 6y agoBecause J Random Grandma just wants to share photos of her grandkids or whatever and doesn't understand all this "computer nonsense". I agree that security needs to be rethought, but putting more moats / popups in the way is not going to work. We already learned that from the past- it doesn't matter how many warnings you put in a web browser, those that are uneducated are still going to mash the install button to get those Comet Cursors or whatever. I'm curious how this will change when the entire populate has more tech knowledge in general. A few decades, and everybody on the planet will have grown up with computers, and a couple more past that and everyone will have always had a smart phone. I'm not super hopeful though. Security and Privacy are always a tradeoff with convenience. And if I've learned anything during my revolutions on this planet, it's that we humans really love convenience. I'd say this will keep getting worse until we get a massive data breach... but we've already had a few of those and aside from it being on the news and maybe a congressional hearing, nothing changes. So I think it will keep getting worse until we find out what the market will bear. And I'm morbidly curious what that will be, even as I scream into the wind attempting to prevent it.
- thinkloop 6y agoGood point but one additional advantage on mobile is the app stores. Currently apps are (supposed to be) rejected if they ask for more permission than their app requires. The problem is that the permissions themselves are too broad. If permissions were divided between regular permissions and super permissions where the latter were flagged for extra approval time and care in approval, it seems like you could have a scalable system vetting the handful of apps that risk asking for them. Additionally it seems like you could design proper super warnings that get adhered to. Do you know of any interesting examples of really severe/gated warnings that are consistently ignored? If you try to visit a website with a bad certificate, for example, it's almost impossible to get to it.
- TheCraiggers 6y ago>Good point but one additional advantage on mobile is the app stores. True. That, however leads down the walled-garden path. Which honestly might be our best bet, but I'm not comfortable with that thought. In order for the walled garden to work, you have to trust the gardener, and I don't trust any of the current ones.
- kochthesecond 6y agoThis is sort of how iOS works(worked?). To share a photo, you had to go find the photo you want to share, then pass that photo explicitly to the app/context you wanted to share it. So a model where you push the content you want into the share app, the app itself was unable to request (pull) data.