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Comment by dvngnt_ | Hacker News Reader

Android needs this yesterday. i hate how meta, tiktok, telegram and other apps try to force you to give contact info.

even when you deny, they'll just ask again later.

GrapheneOS has this really awesome feature that I wish would come to mainline Android: Contact and Storage scopes.

Essentially, it works very much like the feature Apple has introduced for these things, but importantly, it makes apps believe they have full access to these resources, while still maintaining a limited scope through the OS.

I doubt Google would ever adopt this (due to their less than privacy-friendly attitudes) but it is absolutely technically possible, since GrapheneOS has it today.

Google routinely adds privacy features to Android and many of the GrapheneOS privacy features are inherited from or expanded upon Android. It doesn't matter to Google because they can still grant themselves any permissions they want by default on stock GMS Android ROMs, while limiting access to third party apps. (Most people don't know/care that you can deny certain permissions from certain system apps including GMS even on stock Android and this behavior isn't guaranteed anyway.) Contact Scopes is GrapheneOS exclusive for now but it's not unlikely that Google would add something like that, especially now that iOS has it. They have accepted several security patches from GrapheneOS already.

This (well, not this specifically, but other decisions like this) is one of the major reasons I switched to iOS from Android a few years back. I like the openness the Android ecosystem provides, but at least at the moment, Apple seems to provide much better privacy features than does Google. This is just the latest in a long series of decisions and features, such as encrypted messaging (at least for other iOS users; not perfect, but better than none), granular photo sharing permissions, and many more.

telegram has repeatedly asked me for microphone access on iOS the last few weeks, at random times. i suspect it's not just happening on Android, therefore.

Say yes, then deny the system permission.

At this point, iOS does not allow you to change those permissions in-app once you deny them. The only exception is photo access, which lets the app request access to more photos.

Tiktok pops it up frequently and at random, irrelevant times. I think they're hoping I'll press it by accident, or without thinking.

Even when you deny, enough of your contacts won’t that it doesn’t even matter

It does matter. Is this what you meant?:

"Even when you deny, enough of your contacts won’t, that it seems in vain."

I meant that it doesn’t matter if you deny because your friends will sell you out.

What I'm hearing you say is: "Your privacy doesn't matter."

What I'm hearing you argue is that the tree which hides in a forest is still hidden in the forest.

Alas, it's not when the whole forest is infested with ads^H^H^Htermites

I’m not saying privacy doesn’t matter, I’m saying that there aren’t any enforced guardrails on this growth mechanism to protect it. It’s an illusion of choice. Government intervention is really needed here

This is the sad truth, however one can only hope to at least reduce the graph points.

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