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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

If the app can get around the permission system - it’s a vulnerability in Android itself that Google needs to correct.

Sure. And if an app intentionally exploits that vulnerability to bypass the permission system, its developer should no longer be able to publish in the Play Store.

To be fair, denying application knowledge of _device own_ MAC address is beyond absurd. If Google really wants that, they should buy their own MAC block, and regularly rotate the addresses within it when network is off.

A lot of Android own APIs (such as Wi-Fi P2P and Bluetooth) are built on implicit assumption, that application developer knows MAC address of device it is running on. Instead of fixing those APIs, Google now requires everyone using them to request Precise Location permission from user _and_ enable a Location Toggle in device settings. This is pure harassment.

An app developer being able to uniquely identify a device across applications has been considered a privacy violation for well over a decade. Even Microsoft in the Windows CE days made it hard for an app to uniquely identify a device.

The idea itself isn't bad, but Google's implementation of it is terrible. Good actors are forced to show security prompts, that literally scream "this application is malware!!". Bad actors enjoy ability to share MAC/IMEI/whatever with each other and skip whole "prompt for irrelevant permission" nonsense. They don't even particularly care about reading hardware addresses — why bother, when you can embed something like fingerprint.js and automatically identify every single device in existence!

If Google does not improve their P2P networking APIs, everyone may end up eventually integrating some Chinese spyware library, because it is the only approach that does not suck (and there is apparently no penalty for doing so).

Usually apps that exploit flaws in Android are even labeled malicious and actively removed from all devices, this might be even better than just perma-banning the developers.

> If the app can get around the permission system - it’s a vulnerability in Android

That's the same argument as saying that if someone can use a baseball bat to smash in the window to my car, it's a vulnerability in the auto manufacturers glass manufacturing and should be their fault and not that of the car thief. It's an absurd and ridiculously nonsensical argument in defense of criminals.

There's also the concept of white, grey and black hats. Just because someone finds a vulnerability doesn't make it okay to abuse it. The right thing to do is to disclose it, and businesses like Google do benefit from incentivizing it.

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