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Comment by throitallaway | Hacker News Reader

It's annoying that this has become the norm with basically zero consequences for bad actors.

Seeing this article made me thankful for GrapheneOS. I've been dailying it for a few months now. Every single app is explicitly granted network permission (or not) upon installation. Local apps like this definitely don't get network perms, and neither does my keyboard app (that always creeped me out.)

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The norm and actively encouraged by hiding permissions and instead leaving you almost entirely to trust the least trustworthy party possible.

It's not ridiculous, it's straight-up hostile to their user's privacy and safety.

I'm considering switching to GrapheneOS but the fact that it only runs on Google phones makes me hesitant. Yet the other Android replacements look a lot less compatible. Am I being paranoid?

Why not Apple?

Not the person you replied to, but from a privacy perspective Apple won't allow Westerners to disable all network access per-app. Something that's been around in Chinese iOS releases for nearly a decade.

I'd love to use many offline note taking apps, but not if they're liable to randomly upload my notes to a potentially adversarial third party. And the actively privacy-hostile behavior of maintaining a separate branch just to disallow access to this feature is not appreciated.

If you don’t trust app’s developer just don’t use it, why fiddling with network access? Have you tried iOS Notes?

I'm not using it. Same goes for the rest of the junk operating system it's built for.

Can you control which apps can run at startup and which can run in the background?

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