Comment by darren_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darren_ | Hacker News Reader

FTA: "The same is true of Google Maps. Although it makes far more sense for Maps to have access to your location, the latest build doesn't give you the option of turning it off. To do that, you have to turn off GPS on your phone altogether."

You can, of course, switch off location for google maps on android, and I'm surprised this article wasn't fact-checked for that. Settings->Apps->Maps->Permissions. Same as any other app.

I'm assuming the confusion is because the 'location settings' option in maps settings takes you to the phone's global location settings screen, which does only offer a global toggle. I don't think there's anything nefarious there, it's just that the settings menu isn't terribly well thought out.

disclaimer: googler on maps, but not android maps

edit: The article has been updated and now reads: "Although it makes far more sense for Maps to have access to your location, the latest build doesn't give you a decent option of turning it off. If you do cut off Maps' access to your location, "basic features of your device may no longer function as intended," the operating system warns."

Not that they've bothered to update the rest of the article.

This is what kinda bugs me about Android permissions - they're very binary. Either an app has location permissions or it doesn't. Personally, I would love to be able to say "Google Maps has access to location info while it's in the foreground, but not while in the background."

For that matter, it'd be nice if I could stop certain apps from running in the background at all. A task killer isn't the answer here - a few seconds is enough to gather some data and transmit it, and at that point the damage is done.

On Android there is not actually a meaningful concept of an app "running" vs "not running". Each app is actually a collection of components that are registered to different system hooks ("intents"). Whenever such a hook is triggered, the OS launches the components of all apps that registered for that hook.

What would be interesting IMO were some way to see which app has registered which intents and possibly an option to override those registrations.

I'm not convinced it would be so hard. I imagine something like ForegroundToken's: Activities (now plural with multi-window) in the foreground (onResume) gain access to a ForegroundToken. The service requests require you to pass in the ForegroundToken. This token is then validated at the moment of the request.

When the app goes into the background the system invalidates the token, so any work waiting in queue somewhere will actually fail on the token check when it comes up.

If you want to ask a background service (of your own), or fire off an intent, you pass the ForegroundToken with it. If the work starts while your app is still in the foreground peachy, if not, it fails.

In a foreground > background > foreground cycle, your app gets a new ForegroundToken on every onResume event.

If you want apps to have true background access to a permission, that is a separate toggle (yes more complicated I know, but theoretically possible). They then can pass null into the ForegroundToken argument.

If you're rooted xposed with xprivacy has

1. More finegrained permissions (per api call basically)

2. Ability to give/deny permission per use case or some time.

I wonder if disabling "Location services" in Android fully disables it. There is a definite conflict of interest with Google, since they both write the operating system and rely on location data.

To me, the concerning bit of software is not the operating system (which is open source and fairly transparent) but rather Google Play Services, which is a proprietary background service that has nearly complete access to your device. Unfortunately so many applications make use of it that it's hard to ditch. There are open source efforts to replace it [0] but AFAIK nothing ready for consumers.

[0]: http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-micro...

This doesn't seem to be an option for me (Android 5.0.2). Settings->Apps->Maps->Permissions get me a screen that lists the permissions, but there is no way to change them. Am I missing something?

You need Android 6 for this

You assume everyone is on M and later who support this.

Classic living in the bubble.

How is that "living in a bubble"? The last two major versions of the software support the feature. It's nearly a year and a half old.

Classic finding things to be offended about.

Because lets not ignore the fact that more then 50% of devices won't ever see this update, which makes it moot to suggest how to work around something that was taken away. That's classic Google "ship it and fuck the rest" mentality bubble.

Nothing was 'taken away' for pre-M users either, at least Maps-wise.

This article (as originally written, they've updated it since) was stating that a privacy feature that never existed had been taken away. There never was a location services toggle for specifically Maps, and pre-M it's not possible to make one that works (at least, not one that someone who doesn't trust maps with their location should be using).

Where do you get the 50% number from?

These GPS changes started in 4.0.4 (or was it 4.1?) which means 98% of devices (96%) include this:

https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

FTA:

> You can try to deny Google Play access to your handheld's location by opening the Settings app and digging through Apps -> Google Play Store -> Permissions, and flipping the switch on "location."

So it appears the article is talking about M or later.

(my location permission was actually already off for the Play Store, and flipping it on and off again gave no prompt, so not sure what the author was talking about with "but you'll be told you can't at that fine-grain level")

It's difficult to appreciate criticism of older versions and models of things. There isn't a meaningful way Google will be able to address that criticism without updating.

They could just offer a switch to change the behavior in the app itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com