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1. #Privacy guard android 4.3 update
2. #Privacy guard android 4.3 android
3. #Privacy guard android 4.3 code

#Privacy guard android 4.3 android

"The decline is all due to poor ratings on Android 4.4, where the ratings have dived from 4.3 to less than 4 in under a week," says Robinson. OpenSignal, a crowdsourcing app which feeds back data about signal strength in various location, has suddenly seen a rash of bad reviews, says James Robinson, the company's chief technology officer. The upshot is that Android users once again can't control what permissions an app takes for itself - unless they reject the app wholesale ahead of installation.Īnd the effects of that reversal are showing up. And according to app developers, 4.4.2 properly kills App Ops: it simply won't function unless you take the extreme measure of rooting your phone. The change made it through, but then was reversed once again, and 4.4.2 rolled out to squash it. Hackborn removed the feature on 1 August Burke put it back in the next day.

#Privacy guard android 4.3 code

In fact it only seems to have appeared in 4.3 by virtue of a brief edit war in the Android code tree between Dianne Hackborn, an Android product manager, and Dave Burke. Bam! There it was, gone in Android 4.4.2, released about three weeks later. Bip! There it was in Android 4.3, which arrived in mid-November. Once you installed and ran it, you could see and control all sorts of individual permissions - as shown below.Īpp Ops allowed users of Android 4.3 to fine-tune app permissions.īut the exposure of App Ops had only a short life. To access it you had to download a free third-party app called App Ops Launcher. The problem surfaced at the end of last week, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) first praised and then doled out brickbats to Google for implementing, and then reversing, a function which allowed users to set per-app permissions to data such as their contacts, call log, location and so on. The consequences of that are already beginning to play out as people notice the difference - and complain in the only way they can, by giving apps lower ratings for what they see as excessive demands.

#Privacy guard android 4.3 update

And the peculiar thing is that Google seems to be quite OK with that - and in fact has gone as far as to reverse an update which let users block apps from accessing data they shouldn't.

So why would you let an app get that sort of access to your contacts, location, or storage? If you're using Android, the answer is that you don't get much choice, unless (like those 40%+ in the survey) you decide not to download the app. Over 40% said they have decided not to download at least one app due to these fears. In fact the Information Commissioner's Office released app guidelines on Thursday which pointed out that these concerns are becoming significant:Ī survey of 2,272 British people conducted by YouGov and commissioned by the ICO found that 59% have downloaded apps, but that 62% of them are concerned about resulting privacy issues.