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Comment by bmn__ | Hacker News Reader

> We need the iOS/Android model for permissions on desktop.

This model is terrible. OS asks up-front: program wants permissions to do A, B, C, X, Y, Z: grant/refuse? You the user decide that the program should not be allowed to do X, so you refuse. Now the program will not run at all. That's about the worst design possible. A 10 year old can brainstorm a better design within a few minutes.

Investigate prior art:

    man 7 apparmor
    man 4 capsicum
    man 2 pledge

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At least on recent Android versions the apps only ask for permissions when they actually need them, not on install time, and you can grant/refuse individual permissions.

This is also how iOS has worked since forever. I think it's helpful, but not that helpful.

In practice, apps that want access to my contacts usually keep asking for access every time I try to do anything, until I eventually either relent to make the prompts go away or click allow by accident.

And that's me as a computer-enthusiast. I would bet money most normal people just hit allow always. Because it's easier.

The missing piece is "refusing" permission should instead give dummy data: an empty address book, a random location, etc. Better would be profiles: Full, Basic, Public, Anonymous, etc

I'm not necessarily against this but there are some pretty major UX implications for non-tech users who don't understand what's going on. "Who is Foo Smith and why does this app think I know them?"

In Android 10 you "only" need to deny a permission 3 times until it is auto-rejected without a prompt.

Some apps even try to circumvent this system by showing a "help" screen with instructions on how to re-enable the permission manually, but I only saw this twice.

> At least on recent Android versions the apps only ask for permissions when they actually need them, not on install time, and you can grant/refuse individual permissions.

Still, this is not practical enough. A true user-centric strategy would be to offer "mock-permissions" to an app, so that if an app says that it needs to read your home dir, you grant mock permission to the app, and it sees an empty home dir, not yours. From the point of view of the app, it should be impossible to know if it has been granted the real permission or just a mock permission.

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