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Comment by kubelsmieci | Hacker News Reader

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kubelsmieci

Why android app requires access to microphone, photos and multimedia files?

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They mentionned it in the article, this is required and only used by the third-party bug-reporting service (instabug)

The permission request is being removed as we speak.

I would be careful of using the service further after this. I doubt it was only required for generating bug reports.

I wonder what use you think Cloudflare has for your voice data.

You can sell microphone data for correlating ads you see on TV to sites you browse to.

I know what you can do with the data. My question was more specific than that: What use does Cloudflare have for the data? Cloudflare, the company that already has a hugely profitable business, excellent privacy-friendly track record, etc.

I'm always amused when there's suggestions that a company like Cloudflare could in any way benefit from that. To recap, the company that has access to your DNS queries would embed a Microphone spy in their Android app, for a short period of time, risking their massively profitable enterprise business, just so they could shadily resell the few days worth of data they may have gotten for that.

There's so many good conspiracy theories to think about. Why would you choose this one?

You're not just giving microphone data to Cloudflare though but to the third party SDK using it (which CF may or may not have the source to and may have very different goals, security policies and so on than CF themselves).

It’s not just about what CloudFlare could do. CloudFlare is supposedly doing this for privacy reasons but they have third party code in thier product that we don’t know if they have the source code to. Neither you nor they know what this third party code is doing.

It's not about what I think, it's about why CF would request access to your microphone data in favor of giving DNS Service at 1.1.1.1. In the Android app they advertise: "Greater privacy". What privacy does it provide giving application access to microphone?

They explained what was happening and that they're changing it. Further conspiracy theories are unjustified imo.

It is remarkable that anybody building an application with the stated purpose of securing someone's privacy would launch with this permission.

Exactly. The Microphone access is only required when you want to report a bug or send feedback with a voice memo attached.

Instabug cofounder here.

So you're trying to train people to accept microphone access for apps that don't need it on the off-chance a user submits a bug report with a voice memo? I strongly recommend for the entire security ecosystem of mobile users that you don't do this, that's pretty awful. If you get your way for this "feature" then malicious apps will be able to use the exact same excuse.

I'm also concerned with such permissions and getting users accustomed to granting them for any and every app that asks for them (users don't need to be made more complacent than they are).

Can you share numbers of how many people are actually using the voice memo feature?

And also which languages they use it with and how that's handled (if it is) would be nice to know.

That is a really bad excuse. I’m glad iOS doesn’t allow that.

And this is somehow okay? There is a third party binary blob embedded in CloudFlare’s app that needs microphone, photos and multimedia files?

Uhh no.

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