Phones and permissions [LWN.net]

Phones and permissions

Posted Jun 6, 2011 11:29 UTC (Mon) by asymptote (guest, #75083)
Parent article: Phones and permissions

Part of the issue is that it is unclear what is "owed" to the app developers for use of their code.

In my opinion this is incorrect; developers who presume to use the private information of users are the parties who are in debt, not the users themselves. Even the most basic reading of relevant legal statutes, for example the British Data Protection Act, makes this clear.

Users do not owe the IMEI, IMSI, serial number, or any persistent and uniquely identifying token to developers. Ever. I'm surprised people have already forgotten about the uproar surrounding the uniquely identifying serial number in Intel Pentium III chips.

For most consumers, any of these safeguards are essentially pointless.

This is an issue that non-technically inclined users care about, regardless of the comments by the author to the contrary, or else how else would you explain the outrage to proposals like the US REAL ID Act and the British Identity Cards Act 2006?

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Phones and permissions

Posted Jun 7, 2011 15:32 UTC (Tue) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654) [Link]

Agreed. My initial reaction to this article was that it was the recording and centralization of the IMEI number as an indirect mean of tracking phone users was that not legal (at least under the usual European personal data protection laws I am used to).
I find pointless to put the ability of spoofing the IMEI under scrutiny: I'd like that to be a basic right first, even for those who do not want to exercise it.
However, the first thing to examine would be the way such apps record user data...