Puzzled by Permissions
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Why do most apps in the store need network access? I mean, a game like M vs. M? or Four in a Row 2? Tic Tac Toe? (But not the Mines game, yay!) If the app devs aren't, in general, going to restrain themselves, should we at least be looking at a standard system way to constrain permissions after the install?
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@vandys Moved your questions it's probably better suited to here.Thanks
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Any html5 app that needs to be rendered in the webview needs network access to work... something we might try to improve?
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@CiberSheep An app loaded from the filesystem should not need "filesystem access". Similarly, an app using a web runtime should not need access to the network at large. I hope this is something which can be improved over time...
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Really, any app may use the network. What matters really, is whether an app can access data from other apps (and confined apps cannot), and whether it then sends that over the network to somewhere else. Network itself is not a special permission requiring direct affirmation from the user. Currently, only camera and location do, and sharing data is a direct user action by selecting which applications to share from and to, via content-hub interactions.
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@dobey At least WRT the Android-ish kernel underneath, networking is a capability which can be held back. It is not benign to hand out your networking stack to every app; they can use it to slave to a botnet, contribute to DDoS, track your location, pull down and try exploits after communicating your system's apparen config.