Random dummy data would be even better - if you return blank, you give the app a way to know that it's being blocked.
Apps are guests in the user's back yard, not the other way around.
Apps are guests in the user's back yard, not the other way around.
Is android supposed to return a well structured list of fake names and emails? Would instagram show me a list of made up names and user id's if I faked my contacts?
https://developer.android.com/training/location/location-tes...
So it is similar in that you could conceivably have an app that manages fake contact lists' data.
This exists. Something similar is hardly out of Google's reach.
1. An app asks for permission to access my contacts 2. I decline to give permission 3. The app churns for a few seconds, then suddenly returns a list of names that i have never seen before, including fake numbers and addresses (a list of fake names would be too easy to detect as a fake response).
We're probably better off just returning nothing
I'm just talking about preventing apps from crashing if they don't handle revoked permissions properly.
If the phone is mine, then I should be able to easily set it to lie on my behalf to protect my interests.
The typical example people make is Facebook, which they assume would block you if denied your location but instead works just fine when you remove access to location, camera, photos, and contacts. I don't see why they would behave differently on Android.
The goal when designing an interface should be to get it right, not to make something that works for now but will just have to be patched up again later. For many permissions, it would be advantageous for the user to not even outright deny, but to return a subset or otherwise modified data - only one contact group, fixed location data, filtered Internet, etc. This of course sounds like heresy to app developers, and that's exactly the point - it's the user's device.
Which is fine, but I'd also expect one-stars for that kind of behavior.
I disagree. That question is exactly what we're discussing here. What you just said clashes with what you said earlier:
> Apps are guests in the user's back yard, not the other way around.
Either a developer is able to enforce their desired "TOS" on the user's device, or they cannot.
I am on the side of cannot, because attempting to define morals through simple rules ("right to contract") and then asserting that all emergent behavior from those rules is just, fails extremely hard with complexity-induced contradictions. The whole idea behind saying that a user owns the device is to make it clear that the Schelling demarcation point is the protocol, with each party carrying out such in their own best interest. Assuming an ambient authority (a legal contract, in this case) that constrains the behavior of the user's device runs directly counter to this.
Imagine that the use case is not ad targeting, but rather emergency weather broadcasts based on your location. Do we still want the app to receive randomized data?
The app should be "forced" to run with modified data, because that is what the user explicitly chose. The whole point of an app is that it runs on the user's device, meaning it should be ultimately acting in the user's best interest, despite any post-facto desires of the developer. That is the whole idea of ownership - I can drive my current Honda to browse for new cars at the Toyota dealership, etc.
By your logic, a laptop with li-ion battery can be "forced" to keep running in an 140F degree environment, because that's what user "explicitly chose". When it explodes, who's getting the blame?
There's something call operational envelope, which applies to software too. And believe it or not, that is for user's "best interest".
I mean sure, you may face some public outrage. On the other hand, you may have to deal with a twitstorm for any number of other ridiculous reasons. Should the ideal really be to give everyone safety scissors because you're worried about the rare dolt that doesn't know which end to hold? That's the kind of attitude that dumbs the whole of society down and fuels the entitled mob who blames everyone else for their own mistakes.
What you called the user's "best interest" is based on know-it-all paternalism. For 90% of things it will agree, but don't mistake your model user's utility function for actual individuals'.
(And for your li-ion example, there's a reason that's done with a thermal fuse instead of software, which means that the design is fixed. But to the extent that it is done in software instead, then yes it should be end-user adjustable, even if it seems like a really bad idea for them to do so)
I'm not sure denying an app permission to use your data is the same as explicitly choosing to provide that app with randomized data.
If you want to ensure that the system is only doing what the user explicitly chose to do, you need to provide prompts that let the user explicitly choose to provide randomized data.
And at that point, we're probably better off just returning nothing.
Choose Level of Location Access:
1. Full access (exact location)
2. Nearest [major intersection, city, state]
3. Fixed location [home, work, present location, choose from map]
4. Random walk [choose area from map]
5. Ask me every time
6. Deny
Either the user accepts the developers desired TOS on their device, and they get to run the app, or they do not.
I'd go a lower level than the legal contract. If the app says it wants X to run, and you deny X, the app is under no obligation to run. Your back yard, their code.
Ownership (as opposed to renting) enables distributed rights instead of centrally-granted privileges. Hoping that competition between centralized privilege-granters will compensate for a lack of true rights is an error based in the fallacy of efficient markets.
In reality, competition/enforcement is not perfect and defaults matter. To expand on the example I just gave, Honda could indeed require me to sign a contract saying I will not use the car to drive to a Toyota dealer. But with no way of stopping me, their only recourse is to exert resources bringing me to court. To be motivated to do so, they must be actually suffering real harm rather than a mere general desire of trying to prevent competition. So ridiculous ideas like that end up laughable non-starters rather than ever present niggling restrictions that are too numerous to fight.
I'll say it to be clear - regardless of what you think your "terms" are, they're irrelevant to the functioning of my computational devices.