Privacy

1802 readers

300 users here now

Welcome! This is a community for all those who are interested in protecting their privacy.

Rules

PS: Don't be a smartass and try to game the system, we'll know if you're breaking the rules when we see it!

Be civil and no prejudice
Don't promote big-tech software
No reposting of news that was already posted
No crypto, blockchain, NFTs
No Xitter links (if absolutely necessary, use xcancel)

Related communities:

Some of these are only vaguely related, but great communities.

founded 4 months ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Everyone knows all the apps on your phone (peabee.substack.com)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Since 2022, with Android 11, Google removed this access from app developers. Under their new package visibility policy, apps should only see other installed apps if it’s essential to their core functionality. Developers must also explicitly declare these apps in the AndroidManifest.xml file - a required configuration file for all Android apps.

For extremely specific use cases such as file managers, browsers or antivirus apps, Google grants an exception by allowing QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission, which provides full visibility into installed apps.

I don’t use Android as my primary phone, but I have a spare one and I was really curious to find out which apps from Indian companies had checks to see what other apps I had installed.

So I downloaded a few dozen Indian apps I could think of on top of my head and started reading their manifest files. Surely they will be respectful of my privacy and will only query apps essential to their app's core functionality? 🙃

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 days ago (8 children)

GrapheneOS will fix this with App Communication Scopes

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/111359936037411368

Once it's ready and deployed, it will not only restrict IPC, but also app visibility

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (5 children)

Is there an update since that post in 2023?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (3 children)

There have been multiple updates, but I can’t find them because the search feature on Mastodon sucks. I also picked this post, because it includes a screenshot.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What's the summary. Is it likely to come any time soon or is it pretty tricky to implement?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It's definitely tricky to implement, which is why they don't provide a time estimate. But they're working on it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

The last I saw they basically canceled because its too hard to implement. They may look at another way to implement it through profiles similar to the the work profile.

Edit: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113973056128380064

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (4 replies)