Android 11 Will Help You Rein In Zombie App Permissions (wired.com) 37
With 2.5 billion users worldwide, Google has a responsibility to make its Android operating system as secure as possible. But the company has at times struggled to adequately vet apps in the Google Play Store, allowing malicious programs through that thousands or millions of users go on to download. With Google's release of the Android 11 Beta on Wednesday, though, the company is taking steps to make it even more difficult for rogue apps to grab your data even when they do slip by. From a report: Google has worked for years to incrementally tighten Android security under the hood. And the release of Android 11 is particularly focused on expanding privacy improvements to give you more control over what your apps can access and giving more ways to distribute software updates across Android's fragmented and disjointed device population. Android 10 addressed some of this as well, requiring that app developers request permissions and then reaffirm user choices more often. Android 11 adds a feature that allows developer to request one-time permissions for things like the microphone, camera, or location as an alternative to all or nothing. You can share your location with a friend through a chat app once, for example, without granting indefinite location access, or having to remember to wade back into settings to revoke the permission later.
"We can see that people are actually leveraging these features from Android 10 and thinking about their choices when they're giving apps access to permissions," says Charmaine D'Silva, an Android product manager who works on privacy. "So building on that this time we've added even more controls." Android 11 will also rein in apps that you don't use very often, automatically revoking permissions if you don't open it for a still undetermined period of time. If you start using the app again you can always reinstate its access, but the permission won't be lurking forgotten. Google plans to experiment with different cutoffs after 60-90 days, with the goal of eliminating stray permissions without breaking functionality.
"We can see that people are actually leveraging these features from Android 10 and thinking about their choices when they're giving apps access to permissions," says Charmaine D'Silva, an Android product manager who works on privacy. "So building on that this time we've added even more controls." Android 11 will also rein in apps that you don't use very often, automatically revoking permissions if you don't open it for a still undetermined period of time. If you start using the app again you can always reinstate its access, but the permission won't be lurking forgotten. Google plans to experiment with different cutoffs after 60-90 days, with the goal of eliminating stray permissions without breaking functionality.
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Parent and grandparent are samefag.
Re: Good! (Score:1)
Record a Call (Score:2)
I really need to be able to record phone calls (which is legal where I am, and my decision if it wasn't). They revoked the ability a while back. Frustrating.
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You mean due to malicious corporations?
Google's not taking it away because of abuse. They're taking it away to enable abuse. For example, of people who buy their phones and aren't happy.
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They need to fake it if a permission is denied (Score:5, Insightful)
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Misunderstanding of capitalism (Score:2)
Bollocks.
Google is a private company, owned by it's shareholders, and whose only responsibility is to return a profit to those shareholders. If they choose to do that by obeying the laws of the country the company originated in, rather than the country that that employee is operating in, well that is their choice. Google seems to be struggling with the consequences of operating in multip
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> Which countries have laws requiring companies to make operating systems as secure as possible?
Which countries have laws requiring companies to put profit above all else? None.
The US does have law requiring executives to put the concerns of shareholders above the executives' personal interest. For example, an executive isn't allowed to take corporate cash and put it in their own pocket. They also aren't allow to do that by having the company buy a mouse from their wife for $7 million. That's called
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", an executive isn't allowed to take corporate cash and put it in their own pocket."
No, someone else has to put it there.
If the federal minimum wage had kept up with executive compensation it would be over thirty dollars an hour.
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Whether we like it or not, having Steve Jobs running the company (or not) is more important than which stoned teenager asks "would you like fries with that"?
If someone wants to make more than minimum wage, they could try being more than the minimum, worst possible employee. I was making double minimum wage while I was a stoned teenager working at a burger place - I tried to do my job a little better than the other stoned teenagers. Ya know, showing up on time.
Alternatively, you could choose to live somewh
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"If someone wants to make more than minimum wage, they could try being more than the minimum, worst possible employee"
The minimum wage was intended to be a living wage. It isn't. Anything less than a living wage is slavery
"I was making double minimum wage while I was a stoned teenager working at a burger place"
And I was making minimum wage as a non-stoned teenager working in a burger place.
" I tried to do my job a little better than the other stoned teenagers. Ya know, showing up on time."
I not only showed
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> The minimum wage was intended to be a living wage.
https://www.dictionary.com/bro... [dictionary.com]
Minimum means the lowest possible. It does not mean "good".
The minimum wage means that's what the worst possible employee makes, the teenager who is learning some basics of work like "show up on time" and "do it how the company does it's, no how you want to do it".
Anyone whose labor is worth less than this number can't legally be hired, other than as a charity case, because the employer will lose money on everything the
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"Minimum means the lowest possible. It does not mean "good"."
You're not listening, presumably because your argument depends on it.
When the federal minimum wage was instituted it was literally meant to be a living wage. Period.
Citation please (Score:2)
Citation please.
If that's what someone intended, they severely fucked up everything about it, from the name to the way it works.
In my opinion, making it illegal for someone to work *at all* until they have the skills and experience to support a family well would be very, very cruel.
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"Citation please."
https://www.investopedia.com/a... [investopedia.com]
Trivially found with Google. Search terms "the minimum wage was meant to be a living wage". Learn to internet.
"If that's what someone intended, they severely fucked up everything about it, from the name"
No, the name is perfect if your stance is that slavery is wrong.
" to the way it works"
Yes, it should have been tied to inflation.
"In my opinion, making it illegal for someone to work *at all* until they have the skills and experience to support a family well
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>> Citation please."
> https://www.investopedia.com/a [investopedia.com]... [investopedia.com]
So you are suggesting that because the author of an article you like thinks that everyone should make a lot of money, therefore FDR thought that $4.67 is a lot of money? No, I'm afraid "this author wishes it so" doesn't mean that FDR thought 25 cents an hour ($4.67 in today's money) was a good eage in which to support a family.
Anyway, I happen to disagree about what's cruel. I guess if you've already got yours you aren't d
In case you time travelled from 1960 (Score:2)
To be clear in case you've been living under a rock for the last 50 years, when you say it's illegal for young or illterate Americans to work making a things for $10/hour, the alternative, what happens instead is that work goes to robots and Chinese people. The American addicts, alcoholics, and uneducated don't magically start making $80/hour, because their work isn't worth $80/hour. The work goes to China. You've just made it illegal for Americans to have jobs if, unlike you, they are "the undesirables"
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"To be clear in case you've been living under a rock for the last 50 years, when you say it's illegal for young or illterate Americans to work making a things for $10/hour, the alternative, what happens instead is that work goes to robots and Chinese people."
I'm aware of that, and that's why I support UBI. The whole idea of tying human value to work performed is inherently offensive to me, but any rational basis for that belief evaporates when the work no longer needs to be done by humans.
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Ps - the federal minimum wage was originally 25 cents, which is equivalent to $4.67 today. Do you think FDR thought that's a good wage to aupooet a family? Do you think FDR was an idiot?
Or maybe $4.68 is based on what stoner 16 year old will produce for the business on day one, while he teach him basic things about "hoe to have a job".
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The minimum wage, from the days of the Roman grain dole of about 100kg of grain per citizen per month was enough to keep the proles from rioting in the streets in sufficient numbers to overwhelm the city's military forces. Any resemblance of that to a living wage was purely coincidental.
Corollary : after the recent bout of unrest, there will be an increase in minimum wage levels. I believe this is already happening, though not a lot of news from America get
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Ironically, you are the one who doesn't know what they're talking about.
Their responsibility is to follow their charter. Maximizing shareholder value is not the law. It's just in their charter
And it's not even about capitalism, it's about corporatism. Not only are you not in the right arena, you're not even talking about the right sport.
Does this include Google's apps? (Score:3)
Google Play services uses the services LocationPersistentService and GoogleLocationService. If stopped they restart.
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Exactly. This is all very nice, but it doesn't seem to apply to Google's own spyware...
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Google Play services uses the services LocationPersistentService and GoogleLocationService. If stopped they restart.
The last time I disabled Google play on a non-rooted phone every damn time you used contacts or sent a message it would repeatedly nag you ... Mind you the software worked just fine... but the constant nags made it completely unusable.
I had to replace basic contact and messaging apps to make the device usable. Even the fucking keyboard app had to be replaced to keep it from constantly calling home to Google.
Google Android distributed with most phones is defective by design explicitly architected to favor m
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This right here.
No way to opt out of their stuff on an unrooted stock phone. No way to opt out of the bloatware like motorola services either. I see their crap pushing data to an analytics service. Can I block that?
I leave location off on my phone at all times when not traveling out of state, and don't use google services logged in at home, yet somehow maps.google.com starts me off in my neighborhood. Just a coincidence I'm sure.
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Sure, if you get it (Score:2)
Moto isn't putting out Android 10 for my X4 Android One edition. So even though I bought an Android phone whose key selling point is updates, I'm not getting updated.
The amount I give a shit about the version AFTER the version I DON'T GET is negligible.
Stupidity (Score:2)
When an app is installed it should ask individually for each permission it wants, with the default being "No". In other words, when you install an app that wants access to your "Contacts" it should say "This app wants access to your contacts, do you want to grant it?" for each and every permission it *wants* to have, and the default should be "no". Refusing to give an app the permissions it "wants" should not prevent installation. Sure the app may not work, but just because you *want* something does not
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That's pretty much how it does work, although some permissions, such as Internet access, will be granted automatically. This change is revoking the contacts permission you gave the app if you don't use it for a month.
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Timing out permissions is a good idea (Score:2)
I like the idea of automatically revoking permissions if the app isn't used in a while. I'd like it to go further and say that even if the app's being used regularly, if it doesn't make use of a permission then after a while that permission gets revoked. If the app isn't making use of the permission on a regular basis then the revocation won't bother the user, in fact the user probably won't even notice since well they apparently aren't using that feature.
Or use something else? (Score:1)
Seeing all the Google spying that goes on made me stick with iOS, even though Android really improved compared to its crappy beginnings.
We shouldn't clap they are getting rid of zombie permissions, we should be appalled they were there in the first place.