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FTC Settles With Android Developer In Data Exposure Case
Trailrunner7 writes with some good/bad news concerning Android and privacy. Quoting the Threatpost article: "In a landmark move, the Federal Trade Commission has settled charges it brought against the maker of a P2P file-sharing application that the commission alleged included unfair default settings that caused users to unknowingly share photos, videos and other personal data. The settlement with FrostWire LLC may well be an indication that the federal government is going to be taking a hard look at the way developers set up their apps and what users know about the data they collect and share."
The settlement is pretty light: they have to change their defaults and give everyone affected an upgrade. FTC involvement in this is interesting: on the one hand people were unknowingly exposing private data; on the other hand, is FTC regulation of something like this a good thing? In the case of Free Software who does the FTC sue? How would they enforce any rulings?
He said "libertard," presumably referring to libertarians. Questioning government intervention would be the opposite of liberal policy. You anonymous trolls can't even get your politics straight.
The main purpose of the FTC is to protect consumers. This is what they did.
The company in question was accused of misrepresenting what their software does and fraud charges were filed so that a judge to could decide whether the company was guilty or not. The company settled out of court rather than face the judge, which is a fairly strong indication that they knew they were guilty.
This didn't involve any new regulations, no new powers were granted. Nothing has changed. The FTC did the job that they were created to do and nothing more.
But, of course, certain people believe anything the government does is nefarious. I'm sure you never drive on highways, either, because the DoT is a government agency and anything they're behind is automatically evil, right? And you've removed the seat belts and air bags that the DoT requires, too, yes? And you've replaced the DoT required laminated safety glass windshield with ever so breakable plate glass in the car that you never drive on the road, right? And you don't use the internet, because it came from a government funded project. And I'm sure you wish there as no FDA with it's nasty regulations because you long for the days of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" since rancid butter and tuberculosis infected beef is so goddamn tasty.
Stericson (the guy who makes busybox, metamorph and such for android) has an app to do this. You need root of course, but here's a link to the app on the market: http://goo.gl/orhTq
You can also disable the location access for each app individually in the global device settings page.