Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

"Never let an abuser take you to a secondary location": It's OK to offer an app, but if a site is pushing, pressuring or forcing you to get one, it's almost certainly because they want to do something abusive that they currently can't.

Installing an app is a matter of trust; trying to push me to install one against my will is the best way to demonstrate that you should not be trusted.

(Interestingly, I've heard a stance from technically well-informed iPhone users that don't see an app install as a large trust decision, because they assume that iOS is actually decent at protecting their privacy and rights in general. I don't know if that's true; on Android it certainly isn't.)

View on HN

I'm a mobile dev and know the iOS ecosystem quite well, i can assure you that iOS APIs are locked and developers can access very little user data without user consent. What an iOS user is vulnerable to is fingerprinting (not too different than what happens on web tbh) and 0days. But given how valuable iOS 0days are it's unlikely they are used inside large scale generic apps and not for targeted attacks. Also it's unlikely that a random company sits on a 0days and uses it against its users.

So ultimately yes, installing an app on iOS is not a trust decision because the dev are very limited in what they can do. The biggest trust decision is toward Apple that might have private secret APIs allowing them to do things developers cannot. That's a possibility, but overall Apple business has never been around ads, big data and users profiling so the chances are not this high.

Actually there are a lot of information that an app can do by default without asking for any permissions. You can check this opensource iOS app: https://github.com/mysk-research/loupe

For instance: check if some apps are installed or not, and a lot of small informations about your device that can fingerprint your phone with 100% accuracy (like the exact time where the phone was setup).

I know Loupe, very cool project. Yes, as I said fingerprinting is the biggest risk, but personal data, photos, location, microphones, camera access are locked (which is what concerns most people).

Fingerprinting I would argue it's a problem on all platforms though, web included.

> It's OK to offer an app, but if a site is pushing, pressuring or forcing you to get one, it's almost certainly because they want to do something abusive that they currently can't.

Every UK bank is, IME.

With banks I kind of understand it (for key storage/strong biometric authentication), even though the inability to move it to a new phone is a major pain especially on Android (not sure if some banking apps transfer on iOS, on Android, none do and enrolling an extra fingerprint wipes the keys from most/all existing ones...)

It isn't.

That would be my intuition, but can you elaborate what specifically the app (if not given extra permissions) can do? Assuming the user doesn't change settings, web sites (at least if used semi regularly) can store a persistent cookie, so keeping the user identified is possible with both.

The only thing I can think of is regular background pings to track the user through IP geolocation.

Unpermissioned access to all sensors like battery, acceleration. Hardware IDs. Background pings (as you said). Push notifications. Seeing which other apps are installed (maybe, I think that one got locked down). All kinds of fingerprinting.

Push notifications are the most likely abuse vector but are gated behind a separate permission. I think they locked down installed apps, and fingerprinting isn't really relevant if they can just set a cookie. Acceleration is also available on the web. Not sure about battery, but most apps (aside from Uber that increases the price if they think you're desperate) can't really do anything bad with that. So I don't see much left tbh.

> Android

I mean if you use Google products it can be assumed you don’t care about privacy anyway.

The binary decision into which walled garden you allow yourself to be locked in depends on more than one factor, and you don't really have a choice of "neither" nowadays.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com