Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

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While iOS can improve on a lot of things the biggest factor here is that Apple’s business model does not revolve around their user’s data.

If I’m in all honest i don’t have that many apps on my iPhone and the same goes for most of the people I know the app craze has I think settled down quite a bit.

I have 15 apps installed and only 3 have access to my contact list and those are Protonmail, Signal and WhatsApp which I would allow access too anyhow for convenience.

Apple can and should improve permission granularity but as far as contacts go I’m not sure that it’s even a good idea.

All or nothing seems like a good compromise to ensure that apps that you don’t want to have access to contacts don’t, how many usecases can you see when you’ll have to go to individual contacts and approve them one by one?

The best thing beyond that that Apple can implement is per field permissions e.g. I would like ProtonMail to only have access to the contact name and email fields but not to phone number or address but this level of granularity isn’t available on any platform afaik.

> only 3 have access to my contact list and those are Protonmail, Signal and WhatsApp

Yeah, one of them shares your contacts with Facebook. Might as well given all 15 this permission..

That’s not the point the point is that I would not go and mark individual contacts to share or not to share.

W/A can function just as well without access to contacts I just don’t see the benefit of doing that considering that W/A has my details and likely my social network from the other end anyhow.

Last I checked, you cannot originate a message on whatsapp on android without giving whatsapp permission to your contacts. Another user can originate a message to you and you can then reply while maintaining no permission for contacts.

In my experience, whatsapp does not "function just as well without access to contacts."

That is correct. The recent versions of WhatsApp rely entirely on the system contacts. My wife has to e-mail or text someone to ask them to initiate a conversation on WhatsApp because she denies Contacts permission.

It used to be possible to add and initiate a contact within the app but that has been deprecated. Which leads to a terrible UX; why would I want to add a one-off contact like an airline or gig-organiser to my contacts just to ping them on WhatsApp? It just clutters my list, but of course Facebook loves it.

But that is an app problem that you can’t really solve from the OS point of view.

And more importantly if you are using W/A Facebook will know all your details from the other end.

If only takes a few people in your social network to share dats with Facebook or Google for them to be able to construct your entire social network quite accurately.

You can do this experiment yourself, take one of each: a colleague, a family member and a friend combined is all it takes to expose high double digit % of your entire social network and for most people 2-3 of each type would likely expose all of it.

And that isn’t something Apple can protect you from the only option is to not use any such services and not to be in contact with anyone who does and that isn’t something most people would are willing to do.

I avoid sharing data with FB, but personally I would rather share my contacts with FB than with some random app developers.

Don't worry, FB will share it with random app developers on your behalf.

I'm the opposite.

And consumers simply don't have any other options can match what Apple is offering. If an average cares about both product and service experience and data privacy, I don't see any alternative comes remotely close. That's the position Apple has been building for a few years and it's a clever move. This alone can make Apple a lot more attractive for data privacy concerned consumers. Apple doesn't have to worry about the decline of their software/hardware design/production level as before. Data privacy service can compensate those to a very big degree. Any alternative not more expensive, easy to use and not more burden on user's mind as a whole is welcomed.

Am I trust Apple with my data? No, but that's my best choice for now and near future.

The problem with service like Facebook is even if you're careful with your permissions, you out need one friend, relative or even work colleague to be lazy and you're details are no longer secured

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