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Comment by gregrata | Hacker News Reader

I would personally like to have groups of things that can be unlocked - that I can define

- Nothing - essential what's on lock (weather, maybe news headlines) - Face - basic stuff - games, calculator, News apps - Fingerprint - mail, calendar, text message, browser - Pass code - banking, settings

A one all seems backward - there are something things I don't want to protect at all (don't care if someone can access) on one extreme, and things that MUST be protected as much as possible on the other extreme.

I get leaking between apps is an issue, and there are other problems around this - but this approach seems more reasonable

And yeah, for some users (my parents) they just want something simple and don't want to deal with this. So face or fingerprint is a lot better than no code, so this is still an improvement

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I am not sure why phones haven't been made with different profiles. Yesterday (?), someone here mentioned they wanted to be able to give the (presumed) cops a phone that was blank. I pointed out that was a horrible idea, but didn't really explain why.

If it is a totalitarian regime, they'll just kill you. If you're ever really in such a situation, a blank phone is probably the worst thing you can give them.

Instead, why not a dummy profile that's complete with user activity, social media presence, and showing active harmless use? Why not multiple profiles?

For the rest of us, those who are not spies traveling in totalitarian regimes, what this means is you can hand someone your phone to let them use it. It means you can let your kid use it and not expect to get it back with problems. You can even make the profiles based on the password, so that it only appears to have a single account.

Realistically, the biggest threat is theft. This doesn't hinder theft protection at all. It can still have the same protections, while just offering additional profiles.

Android has pretty good profile support, I have my own profile, a guest one which is wiped when you logout, and one for my kids which can't buy things.

Works pretty well for me, there's a little profile icon in quick settings to switch

Nice! That must be a new feature? It had no such thing, the last time I used Android.

Err... I use a Windows phone, even though I'm normally a Linux user. I kinda like it.

It is present on my Nexus 5 running 6.0.1, and absent on my HTC One A9, running 7.0.

I suspect that it's a feature dropped from many/most customized versions of Android.

I’ve seen it on Lineage OS, but it might be tablet-only.

Its available in Lineage OS for mobile as well.

V. 5.x. Lollipop.

>I am not sure why phones haven't been made with different profiles.

Because they're personal devices. And even if they had, 99% of the population wouldn't even know how to begin using them (like they don't have an extra profile on their laptop).

At most phones could use an easy "don't let the person I gave my phone to check some pic see my dick-picks" mode or similar.

> Instead, why not a dummy profile that's complete with user activity, social media presence, and showing active harmless use? Why not multiple profiles?

And where do you suppose this data will come from? Maintaining something of a plausible and active social media presence is not without it's efforts, nor is creating a profile that would stand up to some scrutiny.

If people aren't really looking it won't matter much, but if they are and getting something that seems fake it might end getting you in much more trouble.

Presumably, if the person thinks it is an issue then they will make an effort to create and maintain it. It'd not be much use for most of us, but it might be invaluable to someone else.

This is the sort of thing AI could do trivially.

I figured granular security has more of an enterprise appeal than consumer, and I still don't really see it.

Email, for example. Day-to-day our normal authentication should cover what's in my inbox and/or the last few months of messages. A "deep dive" of emails from 10 years ago should probably have a second level of authentication. You don't access them that often. Yet, once your compromised your whole history of emails can get slurped up very quickly.

I pointed out to my wife not to email anything with our ssn to our tax guy. She kind of balked, but I pointed out if in 10 years he's compromised it's probably still in his email and trivial to scan for ssn or tax documents.

It's been years, but I was at a company that switched to an auto-delete policy after 90 days or something. I thought it was compliance related, but I also think they encouraged you to store important messages in a local inbox which would seem to contradict that.

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