Hacker News Reader

Comment by WestCoastJustin | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something? I'm not a iPhone/iOS user so please forgive me. Does iPhone/iOS not ask if you give permission for this App to view your Address Book?

If not, then I can see why this might be Apples fault for allowing developers to abuse this.

If yes, then how can this possibly be Apple's fault? It seems almost absurd to blame them. The buck stops with the end user for not protecting their Address Book. If you allow some weather app to download your Address Book, why should Apple care? You cannot trust every developer (turns out we are all data hungry), and they even asked to peak in there too.. You explicitly gave them permission!

View on HN

All iOS apps have every permission except location without asking.

Here are a list of things that iOS apps can't access by default:

   - location (only accessible via permissions dialog)
   - existing photos and videos (only accessible via apple-provided picker dialog)
   - reading email or SMS (never accessible) 
   - sending email or SMS (only accessible via apple-provided compose dialog)
   - any data or settings for other apps (never accessible)
   - push notifications (only allowed after permissions dialog)
   - Safari history, cache, cookies, etc (never accessible)

In fact, the only thing apps can access without permission that's really problematic are the contacts. And yes, I expect Apple will be closing this very soon.

You could maybe argue that accessing the live camera and microphone feed are an issue?

existing photos and videos (only accessible via apple-provided picker dialog)

Are you sure about that? I was under the impression that the Asset Library framework (https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Asset...) would allow one to build their own picker and thus access the existing photos and videos. But I didn't go far enough into iOS yet to try it and see what it really does…

That being said, I can't find an app that allows me to select multiple pictures at once. (you'd think the Facebook app would let you do that) Which is weird because I'm fairly certain that Picasa Web Albums allowed that at some point. (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/web-albums-a-picasa-photo/id3...) I remember because I specifically bought the app to upload a couple of folders at a time and I don't see myself choosing them one by one… In any case, while the description implies it can, the current version won't let me.

If you use your own w/o the location permission, you don't get EXIF data, just the bitmap.

FlickStacker supports batch select, as do many other up loaders or photo vaults.

I wonder how they'd go about making the Address Book stuff require permission without breaking existing apps. They could insert a permission dialog, but there'd be no way for existing apps to handle the rejection gracefully as it would likely be a new method in a new SDK.

I guess they could just make all the "get" functions return empty data sets if the user doesn't agree for apps using the current functions.

They'll need to maintain backward compatibility to at minimum iOS 4, there's not many new apps that are iOS 5 only at the moment.

Then does it make sense to call it a "permission?"

Every permission? How about the permission to access your Camera Roll (as described in this blog post)? Clearly that is NOT granted by default.

I think you're overgeneralizing...

Oh. My ipod touch didn't have a camera roll, so I guess that could be restricted too.

Has this always been true?

I really thought iOS did ask for permission. I know I have had to grant it before, but perhaps it was just some nice app developers doing the moral thing.

Wow, that is news to me! My guess is that there will be some privacy restrictions / access control lists coming down the pipe after this flare up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com