On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 9:55 AM, Al Sutton <[email protected]> wrote:
> - Isn't the biggest privacy problem at the moment with permission > granularity on Internet access?, There are many apps that want internet > access just to access a donations page, but as a user of, say, an accounts > program, how can I tell that is all the app wants to do and that it isn't > also sending my bank and credit card details somewhere? I think some people are really missing what the "turn on GPS" setting is. It just is saying that GPS is -allowed- to run. The GPS hardware will only actually be powered up if someone is asking to get data from it. So the vast majority of apps should NEVER be touching this setting -- they should just request location updates when they want them, which will bring up the GPS hardware if it isn't already running (and the user has confirmed that this okay at all with that setting). Another way to look at this -- the GPS setting is primarily there for privacy, to allow users to determine whether is okay -at all- for anyone to be getting the fine-grained information about where they are. The built in maps app (with friend finder and everything) never ever touches the GPS setting. The vast majority of other apps should never have been doing this either. Yes, there are a couple ones out there that have some justification for it, but given the significant abuse and bad user experience and press that was happening with these, we (and I was the main person who made sure this happened so blame me) decided to shut that door now and decide how we wanted to support the much smaller subset of reasonable needs in the future. For example, we should build into the platform a "toggles" widget that allows users directly control these settings on the home screen. We didn't have time to do this in cupcake; if someone wants to work on it, I think we would be happy to accept a good change to the settings app to add this widget in the next release. Finally, as far as putting up a dialog to confirm with the user -- we don't do this, anywhere in the UI, because experience with other platforms has shown that these kinds of dialogs are more annoying to users than anything else (and they just don't work at all for stuff being done in the background). You also basically get the same thing with the ability to directly launch the location settings panel to have the user turn it on themselves. -- Dianne Hackborn Android framework engineer [email protected] Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
