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Comment by bnr | Hacker News Reader

There are some valid use cases for this. "Read All Contacts" is often required to optionally invite your friends. "List running Apps" for crash-reports.

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Why can't some permissions be prompt-based, instead of always giving access to apps? Say for contacts, if you want to invite friend you'll allow access to contacts just now.

This is how iOS does it, and I agree, Android should copy this feature.

This is what Mozilla does lately with new HTML5 capabilities in Firefox (e.g. desktop notifications, camera access, location access, local storage), and presumably is also how Firefox OS works. I agree, it's a nice way to do things.

for that matter, it's also how Chrome/Chromium/Chrome OS work.

Here's a thought: permissions shouldn't be asked for until they are needed, and one that should be disabled with no option to override is to spam your entire addressbook.

Just by accessing the addressbook you already have the means to spam everyone, if you are a bad actor.

To prevent that from happening you've got to deny access to the addressbook altogether, which isn't desireable if you don't want to kill the market for Voip/Chat on mobile phones.

Apps like Whatsapp, or the Voip/Xmpp client I am working on for my company just need a way to determine who on your contactlist is available for chat/Voip via your app.

Also: how do you think that apps like Skype enable you to call some landline number for a cheaper rate? They do this by creating a local dialin number that routes the caller to the actual destination.

What could work is that the OS gives hashes instead of the real numbers to the apps, but that would suck for anyone that had a web service that needs those numbers. (for say creating a cheaper dialin number to call some of your contacts)

For apps that are explicitly used to contact people, sure, accessing the addressbook is assumed. But there should not be an option in any app to "tell everyone in your addressbook about this app!", and apps that do this behind the users back (or worse, mine addressbooks for email addresses) should be outright banned. There's a reason I hand out individualized email aliases, even to friends: far too much risk that they will leak the address, intentional or otherwise, and I can disable the alias at a whim.

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