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Comment by ClassyJacket | Hacker News Reader

This is a huge problem that has bugged me for a long time, and is a problem on the iPhone too. It needs to be fixed.

They don’t get access to everything on your phone do they? As I remember (and this was years ago) they could ask for the photo dialogue to pop up and you could choose a photo but the app didn’t actually get access to all of them, only the ones you chose.

My understanding of the problem is that you click agree or ok or whatever and then... well, we don’t really know what happens after that.

Unless you can audit the code, or someone you trust has, who knows what our devices are doing.

But they don't have to ask for access to all your pictures. You can ask Android to show the standard picker, get the one picture you've selected and that's it.

Or you can do it the way FB does it, by asking for permission to access all your pictures and build your own non-standard picker...

On the iPhone this was actually fixed in iOS 11. The standard image picker (UIImagePickerController) now runs out of process, and no longer pops up a permission dialog, but instead just gives the app access to only the photo(s) the user selected.

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/46594741

Only fixed if apps want use the UIImagePicker though - many want to show their own image picking interface.

But so it’s developer choice to ask for more permission that it really need, Apple seems to provide a privacy friendly framework.

What they're saying is that it should be the user's choice, not the developer's. If I want to run your gallery app with only a handful of the pictures that I have, I should be able to do so.

Because ultimately, developers don't really need to care. Too many users don't understand the implications at all. And if it's for example a messenger that all your friends use, you don't really have much of a choice than to trust it, if you want to talk to your friends.

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