We need a more fine grained permission system on android

Posted Oct 9, 2010 4:19 UTC (Sat) by swetland (guest, #63414)
In reply to: We need a more fine grained permission system on android by foom
Parent article: Some Android apps caught covertly sending GPS data to advertisers (ars technica)

For most permissions, if disallowed to an app dynamically, you could fail gracefully such that the app should keep working since the app would have to deal with that case anyway, for example:

"disallow read contacts" could look like "user has no contacts"

"disallow network access" could look like "network is down / sites are unreachable"

"disallow gps access" could look like "device is always in a fixed (user settable) location"

We need a more fine grained permission system on android

Posted Oct 9, 2010 16:52 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

you could fail gracefully such that the app should keep working since the app would have to deal with that case anyway, for example:
"disallow read contacts" could look like "user has no contacts"
etc.

Taken literally, this is the opposite of failing gracefully, so I would hope the system would not be designed that way. If the application really thinks there are no contacts when in fact there are, that will confuse and irritate the user and frustrate his exploitation of the application.

But I would accept if the application is designed to recognize the specific case of "disallow read contacts" and, other than telling the user plainly that it's acting like there are no contacts because it lacks permissions, it acts as if there are no contacts.