Hacker News Reader

> Google should have figured out how to let applications sandbox data on the SD

It's called put your data in /data. You get a private app data folder by default. /sdcard and /data are both internal storage on the majority of phones, neither points at a physical sd card slot.

And seriously, who wants their messages stored on /sdcard anyway? You pop out the sdcard and all your text messages vanish? What kind of brain dead decision is that?

View on HN

Reading the article, the data the "exploit" looks at is only if the user has turned on the backup feature (disabled by default).

The backup feature is on by default, scheduled to backup at 4:00 daily. I can't find an option to turn it off.

I think the widespread practice of Android applications storing potentially large data in /sdcard dates to a time when /data was extremely small on most phones, and would fill up quite rapidly if you had a large number of applications installed. I don't think that's the case any longer, at least certainly not for an SMS app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com