And this is why I like Androids feature that automatically revokes permissions after a certain timeframe of not using an app
Except from Google of course, the worst offender of privacy that exists.
They put all these “privacy” features in so other companies can’t do what Google already does.
If you ever tried using a Google phone without Google apps, you realize how completely dependent almost all apps are on Googles API in the background, and most of them won’t work without it.
I am actually using a degoogled phone, and the only thing I’m missing are push notifications, for one single app. Everything else I use works just fine for me, but as always, ymmv
It was a while since I tried it now. I used Cyanogenmod before, quite a few years back. But camera was bad with it.
Yeah, the default lineage cam today can’t do a whole lot either
What phone and mom are you using? I’m considering this for my next phone
Reminder to everyone to phone mom though. <3
I’m using DivestOS on a OnePlus 5T, runs like a charm.
But Divest is in dire need of funding right now, and might not be able to continue development, so that’s something to keep in mind, sadly
Do you follow Graphene OS at all? What is your opinion on it?
GrapheneOS seems to be the all out best, from what I can tell. It’s just that their strict requirements needed to achieve this level of privacy and especially security severly limit the selection of devices you can use, which is a bummer.
Thanks! I’ve been looking at graphene os too
Better yet: Bouncer allows you to remove permissions after a given set of time or immediately after closing the app. WhatsApp only gets my location for 3h after I shared it with someone on there - Google would never remove that permission since the app is in use regularly and it’s no problem granting that permission anew next time I want to share something.
Also all my pictures are only accessible on demand by chat apps and not permanently
Obviously, the calculator app needs camera permission for scanning complex formulas that would otherwise require lengthy manual input and calculating them automatically.
Friendly reminder to my Android peeps that https://f-droid.org/ rocks!
I think I open up the google play store like twice a year.
I feel like most people nowadays are just typing math calculations into their search engine. Which obviously also has massive privacy implications.
Yeah. If a search engine knows you didn’t know 5x(30/47)^2 they might be able to derive your SSN from that information.
Once upon a time I wrote an IRC chat bot for my friends and I that could do calculations and convert units (metric -> imperial) with a command.
My friends were impressed that I included units like furloughs, leagues and bushels.
My chatbot was just googling their request and returning the result (which, handily, was done by the google engine itself and was very easy to extract with Beautiful Soup in python). This was 15+ years ago.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with your reply, just a fun memory I guess
There are many fun ways of calculating stuff.
echo $((5+8))or abusing REPL mode of python3 or node.My colleagues once made fun of me using galculator with a tiling wm:
Call me a plebian but I still open up Python when I want to do calculations in the command line because I don’t know how to in Bash.
It’s complicated.
((5+8))doesn’t support floats. For float you need
bcand I always have to look up how to use it. You have to tell it how many numbers it should showscale=2;5/8, by default it also only does integer.
Well yeah. So it can look at its work on the paper.
You weren’t expecting your calculator app to do all that math in its head, were you?
Oh don’t worry, there will be a reason.
I’ve done this on a simple timer app I developed.
Why? Because I want the timer to stop automatically during a phone call. To do this I need to request READ_PHONE_STATE (which bafflingly tells the user the permission is to “make and manage phone calls”). Unfortunately, there’s no way to alter the permission request to tell the user (at least in Android) why you want the permission. They really need to make the permissions more granular and provide some way for devs to communicate what the permission is for.
