Your apps are spying on you.

big surprise.

Remember TextPlus4 that you installed? yep, now ad agencies have your phone's unique ID, location, and sometimes even your gender and age... who knows what else? your contact list?

This article comes as no surprise to me.

I have beef with Apple and Google wiping their hands of the responsibility by having applications require to disclose what permissions they're asking for, because honestly, if you want to use an application, the stuff it doesn't tell you it's doing, doesn't really matter, right?

wrong.

My beef with this is that they're putting the focus on the consumers giving permissions that the software is requesting. A lot of users don't even know what these permissions are, or what they include. "Location" ... okay, so if I turn on GPS, and open that app, are they going to know the address of the house I'm sitting in? Or if I've recently "closed" the application (and it's still running a service in the background), and get in my car and activate my GPS for navigation, are they going to know where I am then? and where I'm going?

The biggest complaint I have with the permissions isn't just that noone seems to understand them, it's that there's no options. You either grant all permissions, or don't. by declining, you're also opt-ing out of using the application.

How about this: The application requests permissions and you choose what permissions it should have access to. For example. If I go to install the game Slice It (which I believe is available on both iPhone and Android), and it requests (these are the actual permissions requested on Android) Your Location (both network and GPS), Network Communication (Full Inet access, Network state, Wifi state), Storage (SD Card access), Phone calls (read phone state and identity), System tools (retrieve running apps, change wifi state).

Why does it need all that?

Do I want Slice It to know where I am? not really. Do I get a choice? not if I want to use the application. Why does it need to know my identity and phone state? does the application want to know if I'm on a call while playing the game? Doubtful.

Do you think that if I asked the developer why they wanted all these permissions, that they would give me a straight answer? Probably not. Additionally, there's no way to revoke permissions other than to remove the application. This is my biggest gripe... Do you really believe that an application, such as Slice It would NOT WORK if there was no location data and no network access? I'm guessing it would, I can put my phone into airplane mode (all radios off) and start up the game, and it would likely run fine.

I get some of the permissions, they make sense, like SD card access to save games and stuff, and Network access to download levels without the need to update the whole application in the market, etc... but I should have the capability of granting or revoking those as I see fit.

The permissions shouldn't be "these are the permissions it wants, is that ok?" it should be that the permissions requested by the application are granted individually, rather than as a group.

But hell, what the hell do I know? I'm just a paranoid consumer right?