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Comment by NotYourLawyer | Hacker News Reader

> The developer of "Bouncer" will receive the text, attachments, and sender information in SMS and MMS messages from senders not in your Contacts. Messages may include personal or sensitive information like bank verification codes.

That’s a no for me, dog.

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Then again:

> Bouncer does not share, upload or send any of your personal information or SMS messages to a remote server. All the filtering happens locally on your phone, based on your own private word or regular expression list.

You can also validate this assertion with the App Privacy Report. Settings -> Privacy (& Security, if on iOS 16) -> App Privacy Report -> App Network Activity -> Show All -> all network activity will be here. Bouncer shouldn't be listed (or at least, it isn't on my device) because it doesn't use the network for this.

IOS really needs something like F-Droid that provides reproducible builds of FOSS. Everything on F-Droid is compiled straight from GitHub <3

> Everything is compiled straight from GitHub

For some reason, that instills terror in me.

its a plus and a minus.

Verifiably open source packages are a net positive to security because it ensures the code running is the same code that has the public's eye on it.

People keep forgetting this, because they spend most their time thinking about security in the terms of a enterprise system, but for a personal usecase, an app extracting data to their servers that i was not expecting is a info leak security breach.

Its just that acknowledging that fact requires treating most operating systems (ubuntu, (but not debian) android, and ios included) as malware and this is a uncomfortable position.

Most apps are compiled straight from some dev's laptop with a largely undocumented environment consisting of many unvetted tools capable of injecting themselves into the build process.

But it's reproducible builds that scare you?

I'd guess rather "builds on Microsoft infrastructure".

Why? It is only Microsoft, they gave us internet explorer!!!

This is the Apple mindset, glossy features and apps but forgetting that these apps are made by people that aren't perfect. Looking at code almost feels 'dirty' to many Apple users. Like first class passengers on a cruise ship being horrified at the oily smell of the engine room :)

It's part of the glamour that Apple has built around its products, but it is mainly a marketing thing. After all Cellebrite and Pegasus manage to break through just fine.

The big benefit though of reproducible builds is that what you see in the code repo is actually what you get on your device. There is no reason to hide this code like Apple do, it's not 'magic' and having visibility helps against apps abusing the users' data.

I'm fairly sure this comes up because the app needs to read all your messages so it can filter them?

Thanks, we couldn't deduce this alleged reasoning by ourselves.

This must be a new take on the word "private".

It's fine that the app on your phone can read your messages, for that reason. It's not fine that it can then send them to its developer or anyone else. (I know it claims it doesn't. My point is that it can, so you have to trust that the developer is telling the truth, and that an update will never make it start to.)

Isn't this because there's not a separate "internet access" permission?

iOS actually does have a separate "internet access" permission for apps, but it's only available for devices sold in China.

So it's not the case that it'd be too much work or technically infeasible for such a permission to be available to us. It's just that Apple doesn't actually care about us or our privacy.

Probably impacts ads too much

It's funny you mention it; I've been cobbling together this link collection the past few days and your comment has spurred me to finally publish it:

iOS: Disable WiFi (not just cellular) for specific apps without jailbreaking https://tinyapps.org/blog/202209100700_ios-disable-wifi-per-...

Yes, the front page of their website says it filters messages "based on content" so that's obvious.

Sounds like a boilerplate warning for people that wouldn't consider the security implications.

(FYI, your email provider may have access to the contents of your email. I assume that's a "no" for you "dog?")

Where do you see that? I see "The developer does not collect any data from this app."

It shows up when you allow the app to filter your messages in iOS settings: https://imgur.com/zPhUdnL

This feels like a case where it'd be good if Apple had two different messages, one for SMS filters which have a ILMessageFilterExtensionNetworkURL configured (which should get the scary message you saw) and one for those that don't (which are sandboxed to be purely device-local).

That said, Apple doesn't really handle the case of permissions changing with an app update very well, so launching your app purely device-local then updating to add something server-side a year later would probably let you get around that.

This app seems to not have the key that'd indicate it's capable of sending anything to a server: https://github.com/afterxleep/Bouncer/blob/master/Bouncer/In... (though, you know, that assumes that the build on the App Store is directly from the source we can see...)

Well, that's pretty troubling considering https://shot.3e.org/ss-20220910_115329.png

Isn't App Store review supposed to at least catch things like that?

It's a boilerplate warning that applies to the maximum possible amount of data-collection that could be happening. The app says it doesn't collect anything, and its source on GitHub supports that claim... but a SMS app theoretically could and so Apple warns you of the worst case.

That's the default. There is nothing lower than that AFAIK.

Maybe there's a specific legal difference between "receiving" and "collecting" data? ("Collecting" makes me think the data is stored somewhere else with a 3rd party)

We had viruses doing it once, now we install that voluntarily?

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