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Comment by chrisper | Hacker News Reader

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chrisper·

He is using Android 5.1... that was before the whole permission system no?

Besides other people don't seem to be able to reproduce it.

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Permissions existed, absolutely.

They were just "Accepted when installed" type permissions rather than "Hey, would you kindly grant me access to all of your data" type permissions.

Does that make it right for Facebook to gather this data? It seems entirely unnecessary.

If I'm understanding the other comments in the thread then the behavior is based on how Android worked in that older version... e.g.

if (on) { /* execute code for said feature */ }

Which implies: " In the version of Android mentioned the on flag is on when you install. It was a feature of that version of Android to turn it on... how can FB know you didn't want it on?"

> It was a feature of that version of Android to turn it on... how can FB know you didn't want it on?"

What user wants that "feature" on? (or at least to send the data to Facebook for storage)

Yeah, that's the whole issue. I cannot think of any reason why Facebook would want to store that data that benefits the user.

Android Apps targeting Android 6.0+ need to handle grant/revocation of permissions at runtime. Previous versions of Android would simply ask for the same permissions upfront when a user installed an app.

Yes but it's still possible to target a lower version of Android and request all the permissions up front which must users would agree to

That's exactly what the Mi Home (for Xiaomi IoT stuff) app does. Pesky little buggers.

I was able to reproduce it.

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