Slashdot Mirror
Google Cuts Android Privacy Feature, Says Release Was Unintentional
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Eckersley at the EFF reports that the 'App Ops' privacy feature added to Android in 4.3 has been removed as of 4.4.2. The feature allowed users to easily manage the permission settings for installed apps. Thus, users could enjoy the features of whatever app they liked, while preventing the app from, for example, reporting location data. Eckersley writes, 'When asked for comment, Google told us that the feature had only ever been released by accident — that it was experimental, and that it could break some of the apps policed by it. We are suspicious of this explanation, and do not think that it in any way justifies removing the feature rather than improving it.1 The disappearance of App Ops is alarming news for Android users. The fact that they cannot turn off app permissions is a Stygian hole in the Android security model, and a billion people's data is being sucked through. Embarrassingly, it is also one that Apple managed to fix in iOS years ago.'"
That is very true; much of it is moving to closed source. Unfortunately we can't have nice things. We can't have nice things because of Tivoisation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoisation ). We can't have nice things because of Samsung trying to "demote" the Google apps in favor of their crapware. We can't have nice things because of hardware vendors and carriers who won't update their devices (forcing Google to move stuff from core into apps that can be updated without intervention). There are a lot of things driving Google into close-sourcing more of the interesting bits of Android. None of those are "because they want to" or "because they are evil". They are, instead, being forced into it due to the evil of others.