Facebook for Android and Why Zuckerberg now owns your ass
dannybrown.me
dannybrown.me
Also, the fact that apps only auto-update when the permissions required don't change produces all the incentive for app developers to just ask for everything. After all, most conscious users will find something they object to at install time anyways and thus might not install and most people don't read the dialog anyways, so not much to lose.
But even when android changes to ask for permissions as they are required (which could be done in a backwards compatible way by not throwing exceptions but just pretending that whatever API call you just made has succeeded, but then doing mothing or returning meaningless/no data), this still would not help with a malicious app asking nicely with a legitimate reason ("let me access your SMS to read the login token") and then using that permission for illegitimate uses ("let me upload all your SMS to my server").
Even with all these permissions, it still boils down to trust and where on the desktop world, this trust was rarely abused, in the mobile world between all the built-in adware and social integrations, that trust is badly hurt.
The iOS implementation allows rejection of individual permissions, doesnt prevent install, and allows the developer the freedom to choose the best possible time to ask. See https://medium.com/p/96fa4eb54f2c
If Android had a better permissions model, you could allow autoupdates with new permissions disabled unless the user then chooses to enable them. That said, anyone who is serious about security has autoupdates off anyway.
SMS are sort of the same issue as clear text email, probably a bit worse.
If someone comes to fix my house, I don't give them a free entry for lifetime just for convenience.
The issue seems to be that you have to give these applications their permissions so they can function, but you really have no way of knowing how those permissions are being used. So you end up just allowing everything and being at the mercy of developers or you act completely suspicious, don't install any app asking for strange permissions and may even fall into these wild accusations that giving Facebook permission to view your SMS messages is like signing over your soul to the devil.
So again, I'm really out of my game here, but I wonder if you could create an app-vetting app for android that monitors and logs internal requests for data (assuming android uses some sort of internal api to handle this) so you could see what apps are making what requests and how much data they're grabbing. And then monitor outbound network traffic to see what put and post requests are coming from the app, how much data is being transferred and where they're being delivered.
Then you would know how much of your data is actually being used by an app and how much of that data is being sent to Facebook. Granted, I'm sure apps like Facebook's are constantly sending themselves data from your phone but the things to look for are the data being sent when the app isn't active or when the request varies an objectively significant amount from the baseline requests.
If this can be figured out, you could then create a database of the results for every app logged and have a security ratings guide for the android marketplace.
If this is impossible, impractical or just plain stupid, I apologize, but it seems like something that SHOULD be possible, so I just figured I'd throw it out there.
A Facebook engineer explained this permission on Reddit when the story first broke. They are using SMS access to speed up two-factor authentication. (They send an SMS to your phone, and then read it automatically.)
Full explanation here: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1t5z45/facebook_why_the...
Should this information comfort you? It depends on if you trust Facebook.
I wonder if more fine-grained permissions would make more sense for this sort of feature. Perhaps it would be better if Android had support for "This app may read text messages from 1-800-XXX-XXXX" or something similar instead.
With it, I have extremely fine-grained access control to a wide variety of "system calls", including access to contacts, text messages and to the device phone number.
In this case, I can permit access temporarily during the 2FA, and then return garbage values the rest of the time. Easy. (Though obviously if they harvest my text messages for other purposes during 2FA, that is a problem - but one can that can be technically solved within XPrivacy imo.)
In other cases, such as running Skype, I deny access to everything always (phone number, my location, contacts, Google accounts are the things Skype makes system calls for) and Skype continue to works fine, so I think this is a viable strategy.
Wait, how does that work?
Doesn't that kind of break 2 form authentication?
If no input is required by the user then it's pointless. If I hack your account and Facebook sends your phone an SMS to authenticate but the Facebook App automatically "intercepts" and reads the SMS message and says "Yup! It's good!" What's the point in sending the SMS message? Think about that for a moment. Why not just send a request to my smart toaster and have my smart toaster just reply "Yup, I got your message!"
Am I missing something?
A good improvement for Android would be the ability to only request permission when it's required for some key permissions (the way iOS does with contacts (I think)). Enable SMS integration in messages? Android pops up a thing saying 'Facebook wants to be able to read your SMS and MMS messages. Cool?'. UAC for Android.
I think such functionality as you described should be included into Android as standard allowing the user to grant permissions to confidential information.
The engineer at Facebook wants to be able to send the phone a message so as to authenticate the validity of a phone number. She writes an Android app to do this. To get the text messages, she has to request the READ_SMS permission, so she does.
Meanwhile, the lawyers at Facebook are paid to protect the company from unnecessary liability. They decide to write a ToS that says they can do anything; that way, if they do something you don't like, you can't sue them, thus protecting the company from liability.
Later, some other engineer comes along and puts these two pieces of information together. READ_SMS!? They can do anything they want!? They must be up to something shady!
Turns out: nope! Just a miscommunication.
The real innovation in our field that I hope to see in the next few years is the right balance among the following concerns:
* Ease of use, even among non-technical users.
* Security from malicious applications / extensions / apps / etc.
* The service provider's desire to not be sued.
* The user's desire to not have his privacy violated.
If you give everything fine-grained permissions, you'll have to be a software engineer to understand how to use the application. If you don't have any permissions, every Flappy Bird clone will subscribe you to paid SMS services. If the service provider claims to be liable for privacy breaches that they didn't intend, then they'll have to prove, in court, at great cost, that they're not to blame, every time any of their billion users complains. If the service provider claims to be able to do anything, the user will assume that they're reading all of his email to pick stocks and get some good info for stealing his girlfriend.
So it's clear that the extremes don't work. What we need to find is what does work. This write-up shows how one non-extreme balance doesn't work. Let's find another one and try again!
No, that fine grained permission can be intelligent & automated to protect the non-tech user. That's where Android needs to innovate. Going forward with giving blanket permissions to anything being the only way to install an app is a bad idea, even if it's a reputed company like Facebook. I don't want 10 different apps accessing my SMS just to enable easy 2FA. I also don't trust many reputed companies into doing what's best for my privacy & security.
Edit: and if one day Facebook owns the internet, then I'll buy a farm, grow veggies and get off the "grid". I'll become a "nature growth hacker" ( remember you saw it here first!).
I understand the downsides though.
I started following this trend of blocking unwanted stuff with ads coming to the web (at the time it meant saving bandwidth, money and time) and got serious about it when google stopped being a search engine to an ad agency. I went in full on when google started its surveillance of what everybody was doing on the web outside google (buying urchin and turning it into google analytics).
See this whole thing started with ads which quickly required tools to monitor people interactions with them and it's all been downhill from there.
I just got a new Android phone and it was an easy decision not to install the Facebook app.
[1] http://allthingsd.com/20111129/the-apologies-of-zuckerberg-a...
// Normal 20-something year old
I find it humorous the way you put that. I'm long past believing any sort of fiction that I actually own the account I created at Facebook (which I never use) and Google (which I use extensively).
Some people aren't alright with the tradeoff. I manage to stay in touch with family and friends without using it, but they happen to use it extensively. I suppose the "it sucks" opinion is just as polarising as the "I have no privacy but it's fine". Looks like the argument will never be settled!
I can imagine attempting to send letters to friends in other continents would be slow, but a nice touch if you received a letter.
And yes, sending letters is fun. Guess I'm just too lazy/used to the convenience of the internet.
Everything you wrongly attribute to facebook is actually made possible by this thing called Internet and was being done long before facebook. The only thing facebook achieved (through unethical and dubious means) is to capture and keep captive a large proportion of internet users. Which is sad as facebook is pushing hard towards the destruction of the internet and is having some success in it (contrary to microsoft who tried the same during the 90's)
Yes, the things I mention are possible thanks to The Internet, but The Internet alone doesn't allow me to do it, we need clients (and possibly servers) to use The Internet to communicate etc. Facebook offers these things. It's not the only offer, but please refer me to a usable alternative that my friends use/would use and I'll gladly consider using it.
Sure. That is fine. But the problem with your statement is that "so far" isn't true. Facebook can and will store your data even if you delete it.
So if the future you starts to agree with my opinion there is no way for you to erase your stuff. It just isn't shown publicly, if you're lucky.
I hate the Android model. On my Android devices, I've declined many installs that I have happily made on my iOS devices because of overzealous permission requests made by the Android version. Being able to grant those permissions as needed and revoke them without removing the app entirely is awesome and why Google has avoided implementing it in Android to date is beyond me.
Smartphones are a huge privacy liability whether apple, google or other. facebook is another mega huge privacy liability.
Why google avoided implementing sane privacy control in android is obviously because google is even more of a über huge liability privacy.
Google basically has a head start of a decade and a reach not even facebook or apple can dream of.
Apple makes money by selling overpriced hardware, google makes money by collecting data about you and selling ads, facebook is a website where people give away their privacy who's happy to exist on devices built by apple and google and has no proven business model (robbing advertisers of money only works for so long says history).
I'm sure Facebook are aware of this. All app developers should be too.
I think this article is sensationalist garbage with no proof of facebook mistreating user data.
Will I agree that the article is sensationalizing, but if history is any indication, Facebook can & will use all this data against your wishes.
I've had the official facebook application installed for months and they never read the SMS messages.
Facebook is limited to what its privacy policy and TOU allow. If Facebook goes beyond that, the FTC, state attorneys general, and a bevy of bottom-feeding class action lawyers will sue (and win).
Anyone who doesn't understand this -- this is directed at the author of the blog post that started this thread, not the parent post -- has no business writing about privacy.
That's an utopian interpretation of how corporations work. Most of them have a motto : "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission"
Proof : A lot of genuine lawsuits...
Not quite. The "genuine lawsuits you mention are proof only that (a) bottom-feeding lawyers file meritless lawsuits in hopes of a fat $$$ settlement, or (b) that sometimes even well-intentioned companies make mistakes and do things beyond what their privacy policy and TOU permit.
It's also possible it's used for other things said engineer doesn't know about via scope creep or as another channel of PRISM et al, in which case those people will be thanking the engineer who added the feature.
> Read your text messages (SMS or MMS) - If you add a phone number to your account, this allows us to confirm your phone number automatically by finding the confirmation code that we send via text message.
I don't mind doing this manually.
> Download files without notification - This allows us to improve the app experience by pre-loading News Feed content.
Happy to wait until I want to load the content.
> Read/write your contacts - These permissions allow you to import your phone’s contacts to Facebook and sync your Facebook contacts to your phone.
Not interested in having my niece's dog's vet's window cleaner in my phone's contacts.
> Add or modify calendar events and send email to guests without owners’ knowledge - This allows you to see your Facebook events in your phone’s calendar.
Might be interested in having this if they got it right, at the moment I get every event I'm invited to added to my calendar, even those I'm not interested in.
> Read calendar events plus confidential information - This allows the app to show your calendar availability (based on your phone’s calendar) when you’re viewing an event on Facebook.
Again, something I'm not really all that interested in.
I don't understand why I need any of these features in order to perform the most common use case - browsing my timeline and posting the occasional update. I'm not advocating removing these features entirely because there are plenty of people who make use of them, but they should be optional - either made optional through changes to Android's permissions system or by FB themselves.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mots.haxsy...
Also, the permissions they ask for seem like FB is angling to figure out a way to play a bigger role in your life and not just restricted to advertising such as sending out a text or placing calls to most frequently dialed numbers when they figure out that you've been in an accident.
But is seems more likely that the US govt. to do any of the following if they make new laws that are an iterated version of the FISA, etc. laws that give them unrestricted access without any need for disclosure:
> Someone is lost, kidnapped, in an accident, law enforcement can figure out ways to subpoena this information.
> Send fake texts or calls on your behalf and then use that as grounds to detain / question / imprison you.
> Data mine text information to figure out if a revolution is happening in a dissident country and perpetuate this by sending texts to a wider network (similar to starting a local twitter clone in Cuba). If this is a friendly country, you can warn your allies and have these people held as political prisoners in countries such as Saudi Arabia, etc.
> Lots of other scary scenarios.
Many applications on Google Play ask for excessive rights - I always presumed this was being pushed by mobile advertising services.
I think it's an important issue for Android, as most users are unaware of or careless with these things, and it's just one high profile (perceived) abuse example away from seriously damaging Android's reputation as a platform.
It's impossible to word it in any different way, no matter what you want to do with messages - even if your code is written to read message from one specific number and not even do anything with it the permission text will stay the same. This is text that was set by google.
> What honest and useful reason can Facebook have to get access to my texts?
If the author googled it he would would have noticed official facebook page that explains the permission used. It's used only to confirm your phone number - if you want to.
> Yet as I say time and time again, this has to be opt-in
Android permissions don't allow opt-in, or opt-out for that matter.
> All it wants are numbers, pure and simple, and the data that comes with these numbers to sell to the highest bidder.
Use something equivalent of privacy settings in CM, I think they're using the AppsOps (sp?) and you'll see that non of the data was even accessed let alone sold to highest bidder.
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This article is unresearched, paranoid, bullshit.
Sometimes I wonder what we're leaving the next generation. I'd love to change it if anyone has some realistic ideas.
EDIT: Why exactly am I getting downvoted?
Well, you're probably irritating people who like Facebook by implying that Facebook's actions are so bad that not having a Facebook account is a good idea. And you're probably irritating people who dislike Facebook by implying that their actions are justified because it's possible to opt out by not having a Facebook account.
In all seriousness, here at HN we're generally looking for posts that contribute to the discussion. Your post simply bashes Facebook and/or Facebook users without saying anything that isn't trite and hateful.
I wouldn't call that hateful. That's just a fact. And it would solve the problem.