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On the technical side, the user should be able to selectively deny the application access to some of the resources. (ie. each permission should be associated with a checkbox, and its description should not only answer the question "what" resources are needed but also "why")

On the policy side - if the application is found to abuse this contract - it should be removed from the Market and optionally from user devices.

It's not an unsolvable problem. It's just that no one simply thought about it in the first place. Which is not that surprising if you recall what is the privacy policy of Google itself.

0_o
That line of logic goes nowhere fast.
You can't make every possible capability of every application able to be disabled.

It's not 'abuse' of anything if you agreed to it.

Read the contracts you sign. Simple.

This isn't really a platform issue at all, this is a developer issue: the application developers do things they are not supposed to. As such a simple fix is most likely the best one: if your application transmits identifying data anywhere it must clearly tell the user what it is going to transmit and where, and if the application doesn't comply then it is removed from Android Market.

Simple, and efficient.

Yup.
That's exactly what they do, so there's no problem.

That's exactly what they do, so there's no problem.

No, they don't. The app asks for permission to personal information and internet and yes, user is presented with the dialog, but then the application is not required to actually inform the user of what the personal information is used for and if it is transferred to another party, and to whom. That's the whole point: Google should require the developers to have the application then clearly state all that.

trolls are getting uglier, I swear.

It's not very likely as Google is part of the problem, they are not any better than lots of the 3rd party developers. Some Goolge apps actually require access to far more than their capabilities, functionality and usecase requires.

On some areas they are a little "better", since at least some of their apps have EULAs. If you bother to read, as an example, the one for the Android Google maps application. It more or less spells out that it's spyware(it don't collect passwords and such, but anything else), giving Google rights to use all the information it collects in any way they see fit.

Call me old fashioned, but i would kind of prefer if they had the decency to shot me in the rear with a tranqualizer gun when they wanted to radio tag me.

Edited 2010-10-05 09:25 UTC

Shouldn't the developer be removed from the market ("life") as well? This kind of practice shouldn't be tolerated.

That's a bit naive. In general (fancy tainting aside) there is no way to tell what an app does with data it receives. The only way to solve this is to prevent the app from getting the data in the first place, *and* make it hard for it to know this. That is, if the app knows it is being denied private data it will just say "Let me access your private data or I won't run."

The solution is fairly simple and obvious: basically extend droidwall to all the other Android permissions, so if you 'block' GPS access, it doesn't fail with an exception, it just reports a random/generic location.

This has been suggested many times on the Android bug tracker and mailing lists, but Google think their current approach works. Clearly it doesn't.

Very true.


Also true. That's the very reason why I didn't install Yahoo Mail and Opera while I had the firm intention to install these apps... until I saw the permissions needed: access to non-free services, to the contact list, the SMS, control of system services, and what else. Why does Yahoo Mail wants to be able to send text messages from my phone? Having an unlimited number of short messages in my contract doesn't make it acceptable.

On another subject, I was looking for a virtual keyboard app to replace the default one in HTC Sense. And I read somewhere that one of the major contenders in that field has started asking for network connections in one the latest releases while in the past, it didn't have that network access permission. Really, why does a virtual keyboard app need network access? What could prevent them from logging all my usernames and passwords? One user (of their non-network version) contacted the developer about that issue and never got an answer... How carefree are the people who install such an app? That's what I am appalled at.

Well, AFAIK, the real situation is that on both OS, the applications can access part of or all of your personal data.

The differences between OSs being that on iOS we're sure that there's a unique device identifier (on Android we don't know) and that on Android applications have to tell the user that they want to access said data during install time.

So it's rather iOS that's a bit wrong from a security point of view. But well, the App store is a perfectly safe ecosystem so the local OS does not have to be secure, isn't it ?

Edited 2010-10-04 16:37 UTC

OK, I scanned thru the linked paper and I found that Amazon, facebook and Twitter all track your identity.

I'm SHOCKED!!! that users would provide info to sites that require your identity to be functional.

In every case actually described, the UDID is a simple shortcut for associating info that you've allowed (maybe, even "demanded") to be sent to the website.

And this is what kind of issue? None of the examples I described were in any way a compromise of users' identity, rather, they were facilitators of users' requests.

Help me understand why this is an issue again?

The problem is that this kind of notice is rarely very clear.

There are some apps that will track your movement with the GPS, have full access to the internet, access your Google account and read your memory card and your identity – all for perfectly benign reasons. For instance, one of the sports tracking apps I use wouldn't work well without it. Most actual phone apps (i.e. the ones that aren't games or make fart sounds) are made for some kind of information sharing. One problem with the articles is that they treat most kinds of information sharing as "suspicious", so they're almost tailor-made for FUD.

However, even though it's easy enough to avoid fart apps that demand access to your contact list, the GPS and network, the privacy policy of ad-supported apps that do make use of private information for good reasons isn't often readily available. Google really ought to upgrade their access rights lists with more relevant information.

It's not hard to read a contract, and if you don't understand what your computer is doing, you're going to get taken in, and that's no one's fault but your own.

If you understand your computer, you'll realise there's no need for a fart application to share anything.

If you don't understand how your car works, you're going to get sold blinker fluid and tire lubricant.

"Ignorance of the law is no excuse".

Evidently, you've never seen the Android market. Contracts? It's hard to find even a EULA, and I've certainly never signed a contract to use any apps there.

Evidently, neither did you read my comment.

I read it, and I read the article.

I haven't used the market because the phone companies keep discontinuing things rather than lowering the price.

Your first comment seems full of information not relevant to the situation at hand, though the next one is.
If there's no EULA-like thing shown, then there's a problem, but I doubt that there isn't one.

That said, I'm unlikely to get much from it, as most of it is non-free.

If there is no EULA visible, then there is no EULA at all. You can't agree to something which you've never seen.

Look, I'm saying I don't know if it's shown.
I'm not taking your word for it that they're not showing this, though Google requires it and says they do it.

IIRC there's a setting for automatic agreement. I could be wrong there, as that's the sort of thing that one can set on/off in Linux/BSD package managers.

You seem to take a lot of things for granted. Google shows what rights an app needs before install. That's all. No EULA, and you can certainly not auto-agree to an EULA, as the very concept of an agreement sort of depends on both parties knowing what they agree to.

Uhm, no. The main difference is that one article focused on the use of UDIDs on iOS and the other focused on how an Android app called Taintdroid could help you eavesdrop on how various apps use various bits of information. iOS apps can read your phone number and contact list as well. The article says nothing about whether they do or don't.

It's not 'stealing' if you give it to them.

Wow! End of the world.

well it was when Microsoft was accused of doing it so why not Andriod? Oh that's right - it's by everyones flavour of the month - Google.