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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I think the issue is not the Android Facebook messenger. It's Android. Because you have a platform that not only permits apps to do this, but an app store that approves apps which does this.

I am hoping to get my own data from Facebook and check it against when I switched to Windows as a mobile OS. As it stands, only two built-in apps, People and Messaging, have access to my call history.

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Android also has absolutely useless permission categories. Supposedly lots of apps legitimately ask for "read phone status and identity" just so they can e.g. pause a game when a call comes in. The same permission lets them scrape all kinds of info like phone # and IMEI. Which is the app doing?

Android just looks like a privacy nightmare.

The Play Store team should not be permitting apps in the store without extreme skepticism of the permissions they request, particularly in certain categories.

The Facebook app should be pulled from the Play Store until its permissions are reduced, but I doubt Google will do it.

The user can always refuse access to SMS, contacts and other sensitive features on Android. I have Messenger on my Pixel, it's working fine without having access to all of that.

This is actually untrue for about half of all Android users. Being able to granularly adjust permissions is fairly new, and of course, if you aren't buying the latest phone every year, it'll be a long time until you get this.

The app store approves these apps, while at the same time denying other apps, like Adblock, that work directly against tracking. I have to void my warranty on a phone purchased at full price, with no plan, before I am allowed to install it from F-Droid.

Cue in the «soviet Russia / product sells you» jokes.

>I have to void my warranty on a phone purchased at full price, with no plan, before I am allowed to install it from F-Droid.

You don't need to root the phone to get apps from F-Droid.

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