The ability for an app to place phone calls or send SMSes are listed under big bold text reading something to the effect of "Things which may cost you money" on the permissions screen.
If you look at the screen at all, you can't miss it.
Whomever told you that Android being open source meant you could do whatever you want with your phone did you a disservice.
Android is FOSS, but it's running on proprietary hardware - hardware which manufacturers are incented to lock down and prevent you from modifying the software on the phone.
In part this is to protect the phone from being subject to corrupt upgrades (if the signature of the OS package isn't correct, it won't install), but in larger part it is to allow phone companies to restrict access to functions they'd rather you not have.
If you really wanted an open phone, look into Openmoko, or if you want the next best thing (but in a real world usable format), Nexus One was a pretty big win right up until it stopped being sold.
For example, the way I enable tethering on my vanilla N1 is to go Settings->Wireless & Networks -> Tethering & Portable Hotspot. Here I can either turn the phone into a wireless access point or enable USB tethering.
Google controlled this phone, not the phone company, so the full suite of functionality is available out of the box, the vendor hasn't disabled anything.
I was asking about Consumer Report and Consumers Report, not Consumer Reports. I keep seeing these referenced yet have never heard of them before.
Not sure if I'm just feeding a troll here, but the former two, at least in the context where we're talking about their iPhone 4 test results, are simply misspellings of Consumer Reports.
Even still, if you can test individual characters of the hash, and can choose passwords with known hashes meant to resolve each subsequent byte, you could reverse engineer the hash in this way - or at least some portion of it before a rainbow table of likely password possibilities allows you to complete the password.
I don't know about Toyotas, but in the case of at least my own late model cars, there's a little physical switch on the brake pedal lever. Depressing the brake releases the switch, completing the circuit. It's a closed circuit purely electric (rather than electronic) loop. The braking system, and the brake lights are wholly different systems.
Honestly if you're going to make a car analogy while accusing someone else of making a bad analogy, at least try to make it fit the actual scenario.
You just bought a new luxury car, it works fine until it suddenly drops 1,500 RPM, possibly completely stalling but at best losing a chunk of fuel efficiency and power while you're in the act of driving it, just because you touched the steering wheel at a certain spot.
We're talking about taking pictures of booms and other oil recovery equipment. I wasn't aware that this required taking a picture from above the water of what is going on below the water (or vice versa), unless there's a different Snell's law (or another aspect of it) that I'm not familiar with.
Requiring people to stay a reasonable distance from the recovery equipment trumps the need for good aesthetics in photography. If you really need to be *above* it to obtain the correct angle, rent a helicopter.
In fact, car manufacturers face this all the time with after market installs. Even police car fittings typically are after-market (light bars, custom blinkers, etc). There was an issue a few years back where Ford Explorers were accidentally accelerating while parked because of how the light bars were patched into the electrical systems. Instead of throwing their hands up in the air and declaring the whole vehicle now violated warranty, Ford redesigned the electrical systems to allow for this, and issued an advisory on a better way to install these on older models.
Apple should still fully support even jailbroken phones, but if what you have to support might reasonably be caused by a software issue, they can require that they be allowed to flash your firmware back to factory condition before they'll look at it. Once running factory software again, there's no longer any reason not to support it.
If we were talking film era cameras, I might be inclined to agree with your points (though I still think 65 feet is wholly reasonable even then). We're talking digital SLR era now though. Frame up your shot a bit wide to allow for movement from waves, capture 60 frames over 8 seconds, and keep only the good ones cropping in (really 21mp leaves you lots of room for cropping). One of them is not going to have accidental wave peaks, is going to be at a natural peak of your boat and the boom, and is going to come out fairly clear. If not, do it again, it only cost you 8 seconds of shooting plus 2 minutes of image review.
If you need a higher angle, climb to an upper deck of your ship (presumably if you're a serious photo journalist, you're able to secure better than a kayak).
This is a wholly reasonable working and safety margin, and with modern equipment should pose no significant challenges to any photographer who's actually interested in taking a shot.
telling Adobe to make a flash client that doesn't kill the battery and completely suck
Having had my Nexus One get the Froyo 2.2 update today, and giving Flash on my handset a try, I think they've accomplished this.
I spent a fair chunk of time on Kongregate playing various Flash games today. Battery usage indicates 66% usage was to power the display, 7% usage to power the cell circuits (cell standby), 5% for Wifi, 4% was the browser, and the rest was miscellaneous other stuff all at lower percentages than this (Android System, my live wallpaper, akmd, phone idle, and so forth).
It never felt clunky or unresponsive. Very minimal battery impact. This is better than most native games! As far as I can tell, mobile Flash doesn't suck for any definition of the word which allows the possibility of Flash not sucking.
Of course this was never the reason Apple refused to allow Adobe to even try. The real reason is that Apple can't charge their 43% App Store levy on Flash based applications. They want a cut of the action for every thing you do with your phone, and HTML5 is a viable alternative for only a subset of what Flash is capable of, so this is just a shell game for them (officially supporting an immature standard which has been years maturing and is still years from maturity, while capitalizing on the gap and competing with might rather than product quality while claiming they're competing on product quality).
Worse, the people you subjected to the experience will know, and they will contact a lawyer to see if they can squeeze some money out of you somehow.
They will probably do this even if you didn't know about it, class action.
After all, your product still caused them the same amount of harm, they are entitled to recover the same reparation as they would be if you knew about it.
But punitive damages if any would consider whether they knew whether there was an issue. It's a lot more evil to knowingly release a detrimental product than to release a product which is later discovered to be detrimental. On the one hand, the company has actively forsaken the health of its customers, while on the other, the company has at least seemed to actively defended their health (presumably the company acts aghast, immediately halts production, and sets up some sort of good will reparations fund).
My company sells a healthcare related product (my opinions are my own and not the company's, yadda yadda). We have a similar obligation to the government, we have agreed to give them the best possible price, and we may never sell it for less than that amount without discounting the price sold to the government as well.
A data entry error a few years ago led to a major distributor getting a trivially better price (somthing like $0.01) than the government. Two different promotions overlapped with each other because of a data entry error (a pricing promo ran a month longer than it was supposed to, and overlapped for a few weeks with a later promo). This ended up being a huge deal, the penalties we had to pay were phenomenal. Well more than the entire profit we had made on that product within two years.
As a result we wrote custom pricing validation for our SAP system which always checks the CDC's price whenever price promotions, quantity discounts, contract prices, or multi-product-discount data are entered, and won't let the user save the new data until either the CDC has had a better price entered for it as well.
Because of the way SAP pricing works (and because we want to run pricing the same way it runs when you place an order rather than trying to optimize it by trying to identify duplicate work and skip it), it basically has to price all affected products individually and in combination with each other at each discount tier for each day in the effective date range of the pricing records. It's very slow. But it's better to pay someone to watch a "Now checking pricing for Dec 12... Now checking pricing for Dec 13..." message scroll slowly by than to risk another two years worth of profit on a product.
While Jerry Falwell agrees with you, the US Supreme Court does not. I can be as mean and vicious and petty and spiteful in parody as I want to, with explicit legal protection.
There is a difference between parody and libel. GP was merely asserting that you don't get a pass on libel by calling it parody (unless the original piece clearly states it in prelude).
I don't know exactly what the kids posted in this case, so I don't know if it was libelous or just parody. But since the girl created a fake MySpace profile for her principal, making him out to be a pedophile and mentioning a sex act, chances are she came down on the side of libel - that is the principal's reputation may be damaged by what she posted, and a reasonable person may not have necessarily known it was intended in jest.
An anecdote is an incident (as in a one-time occurrence). This is an ongoing positive experience, which has also been shared by those of my friends who have made the same sort of switch.
It's more of a user review and comparison based on first hand experience of both sides of the comparison (thus more balanced than the average user experience). That is to say, this is as meaningful as it gets in terms of device reviews, and I'm not on the fence at all, coming down without hesitation on the side of Android.
Agreed, my iPhone can't compare to my Nexus One. N1 was the most satisfying phone upgrade I've ever bought (even more than my dumb phone to my iPhone).
Oh, wait, you meant to say that iPhone was better? Sorry, I just don't see it.
No, exactly like the iPhone. For example, iPhone has supported tethering since the 3G model (version 3.0), but was disabled by AT&T. There was a short while where you could update the carrier info on the phone and it would enable tethering as a built-in function via either USB or Bluetooth.
The 3.1 update not only disabled this simple work-around, it also locked the phone so you could not downgrade to 3.0. I had an iPhone at the time, and refused to ever install the 3.1 update so I could stick with tethering. I now have a Nexus One, and have never regretted the upgrade. I also bought the N1 directly from Google, and not only did I avoid a new contract, but I'm no longer subject to having my handset intentionally crippled by my carrier.
Replying to myself, it seems like there are different builds for different submodels of the phone. For example the AT&T compatible phone (like I have) doesn't use the same update file as the T-Mobile compatible phone. Haven't had luck finding the EPE54B download yet.
I believe you're purposely misinterpreting my sentiments. The Gamestop analogy would only be true if Gamestop sold you a game console which can only play games sold by Gamestop, and also they refuse to sell any game which is available for multiple platforms.
I agree trust and software installations can be done much better than the iPhone app store, but I don't see any company that has done it.
The question is one of chain of trust. The proposal on the table is that the App Store has the advantage of providing this chain of trust by its nature, and that it's unusually well suited for this. My contention is that software trust has already been solved in a manner which doesn't require tying a consumer's hands, and that the App Store doesn't offer any advantage over existing models, and has a number of disadvantages unique to itself.
I do think it's the right of the consumer to use a device they purchased in whatever way they want. I think it's the right of the consumer to not be subject to intentional crippling of their hardware on the part of the manufacturer.
I do not think it's the right of the manufacturer to intentionally limit their product in a way meant to prevent the consumer from being able to experience the full range of possibilities in that device unless they have paid the manufacturer for the privilege of doing so.
This isn't hypocritical and is internally consistent. Of course the usual caveats apply: I don't have a problem with a manufacturer blocking illegal uses of a device (so long as they do not block legal uses in the process), and I understand that it's legal for a manufacturer to act in the ways I have proscribed above, but still don't think they have a right to it.
when you have an alternative right next door (Android) that you didn't choose?
Actually I did choose it. I had an iPhone, and once Android became competitive (version 2.1), I bought a Nexus One.
The problem is that just because I make an informed choice doesn't mean the average consumer is going to. Software freedom (including and especially freedom of choice) is good for the industry at large because it fosters competition. Apple is currently betting that it has enough market share to remove software freedom, and even to dictate what technology is used by the industry at large (they assume they're big enough that they can get people to abandon Flash, and whether or not you like Flash, it's still very bad to have one company tell the entire industry what they can't do).
Even though I've already abandoned Apple, it's their belief that enough people won't do this that they can retain their clout. The industry as a whole is damaged as a result. Further it sets the precedent that a software company can dictate what other software you run on the same device for business reasons rather than for technical ones (i.e. we're not talking software incompatibility, we're talking rejection because they say so). Apple is the first, if they succeed, you can guarantee that other companies will be looking to shut out their competition simply by refusing to let you run the competition's software. The entire thing is creating an atmosphere of anti-competitiveness.
I don't agree. Sure, it's acceptable to have a walled garden, and to even make it the case that by default you can only wander the carefully groomed paths in that space. But if you want to peek over the wall, or even exit the garden, you should be permitted to. Sure, raise a few warning "Oh no's, nobody can tell you whether these apps out there have thorns or not," screens. But don't prevent me from leaving or else what you have is actually a carefully tended prison (it's even called jailbreaking when you exit the approved area).
For especially sensitive apps (eg, banking), most people will generally understand that you should stick to the official app store. But thinking that any entity is immune to fraud being perpetrated against it is naive. We see big corporations like Verisign - whose whole job is to verify identity before issuing a certificate - issuing certificates for people who don't have the proper credentials.
Certainly we have not seen Apple exercising consistency in what it approves and rejects for the app store, so it doesn't seem like they're really looking all that closely anyway.
We've solved issues related to trust a long time ago for SSL (at least as strongly as the walled garden app store solves it); there's no reason to reinvent the wheel here in a way that locks down consumer property against their will.
Android's Market tells you exactly what an app can and can't access before you install it. In order to access certain classes of API, the app has to include this access in its manifest file or the API's aren't available. Examples include location (there are two tiers: rough network-based, and precise GPS based), phone (again, two tiers: phone state [usually to do things like pause music when the phone rings], and the ability to place/receive calls), network access, storage (read or modify SD card contents), SMS, camera access, contact data, calendar, email, phone sleep functions, and so forth.
Certain accesses are considered sensitive, and will be specifically brought to the user's attention before they install the app. Other controls (such as access to the phone's vibrate function) aren't, and although you can look to see if the app uses those functions, you're not bothered to verify that this is ok first.
So if an app wanted to poach your phone number, etc. on Android, it would basically have to advertise to you that it's doing so or it wouldn't have that level of access.
That said, I do wish there was a way to *block* those accesses.
What if my doctor recommends a trip to Jamaica? Or a year-long global cruise?
The problem isn't doctors who make recommendations in good faith, it's that it becomes difficult or impossible to distinguish between good faith recommendations and doctors who are willing to game the system because their practice will have patients waiting in line for an appointment once word gets out.
I doubt the government is thinking that this case is an abuse, they just realize that it's a highly abusable scenario and need to tread cautiously lest they begin subsidizing people's recreation.
So we should just let companies get away with deplorable behavior because there's probably a different company out there who doesn't do it? This is not just a slippery slope, it's a flowing stream (meaning that progression down the slope is not just likely, but inevitable).
Companies will act in self interest over employee interest whenever they think they can get away with it. If we accept some employers requiring people to install certain software on employee home computers as part of their job duty, eventually nearly all employers will do this, and it will be difficult or impossible to find employers who don't. Those who don't will be operating at a competitive disadvantage to those who do.
I'm sorry, "so get a different job" is never an acceptable justification for a company trying to screw an employee. It may be good advice for the employee, but it can't be used to dismiss the employer's actions.
Slashdot Mirror
The ability for an app to place phone calls or send SMSes are listed under big bold text reading something to the effect of "Things which may cost you money" on the permissions screen.
If you look at the screen at all, you can't miss it.
Whomever told you that Android being open source meant you could do whatever you want with your phone did you a disservice.
Android is FOSS, but it's running on proprietary hardware - hardware which manufacturers are incented to lock down and prevent you from modifying the software on the phone.
In part this is to protect the phone from being subject to corrupt upgrades (if the signature of the OS package isn't correct, it won't install), but in larger part it is to allow phone companies to restrict access to functions they'd rather you not have.
If you really wanted an open phone, look into Openmoko, or if you want the next best thing (but in a real world usable format), Nexus One was a pretty big win right up until it stopped being sold.
For example, the way I enable tethering on my vanilla N1 is to go Settings->Wireless & Networks -> Tethering & Portable Hotspot. Here I can either turn the phone into a wireless access point or enable USB tethering.
Google controlled this phone, not the phone company, so the full suite of functionality is available out of the box, the vendor hasn't disabled anything.
Not sure if I'm just feeding a troll here, but the former two, at least in the context where we're talking about their iPhone 4 test results, are simply misspellings of Consumer Reports.
Even still, if you can test individual characters of the hash, and can choose passwords with known hashes meant to resolve each subsequent byte, you could reverse engineer the hash in this way - or at least some portion of it before a rainbow table of likely password possibilities allows you to complete the password.
I don't know about Toyotas, but in the case of at least my own late model cars, there's a little physical switch on the brake pedal lever. Depressing the brake releases the switch, completing the circuit. It's a closed circuit purely electric (rather than electronic) loop. The braking system, and the brake lights are wholly different systems.
Honestly if you're going to make a car analogy while accusing someone else of making a bad analogy, at least try to make it fit the actual scenario.
You just bought a new luxury car, it works fine until it suddenly drops 1,500 RPM, possibly completely stalling but at best losing a chunk of fuel efficiency and power while you're in the act of driving it, just because you touched the steering wheel at a certain spot.
We're talking about taking pictures of booms and other oil recovery equipment. I wasn't aware that this required taking a picture from above the water of what is going on below the water (or vice versa), unless there's a different Snell's law (or another aspect of it) that I'm not familiar with.
Requiring people to stay a reasonable distance from the recovery equipment trumps the need for good aesthetics in photography. If you really need to be *above* it to obtain the correct angle, rent a helicopter.
In fact, car manufacturers face this all the time with after market installs. Even police car fittings typically are after-market (light bars, custom blinkers, etc). There was an issue a few years back where Ford Explorers were accidentally accelerating while parked because of how the light bars were patched into the electrical systems. Instead of throwing their hands up in the air and declaring the whole vehicle now violated warranty, Ford redesigned the electrical systems to allow for this, and issued an advisory on a better way to install these on older models.
Apple should still fully support even jailbroken phones, but if what you have to support might reasonably be caused by a software issue, they can require that they be allowed to flash your firmware back to factory condition before they'll look at it. Once running factory software again, there's no longer any reason not to support it.
If we were talking film era cameras, I might be inclined to agree with your points (though I still think 65 feet is wholly reasonable even then). We're talking digital SLR era now though. Frame up your shot a bit wide to allow for movement from waves, capture 60 frames over 8 seconds, and keep only the good ones cropping in (really 21mp leaves you lots of room for cropping). One of them is not going to have accidental wave peaks, is going to be at a natural peak of your boat and the boom, and is going to come out fairly clear. If not, do it again, it only cost you 8 seconds of shooting plus 2 minutes of image review.
If you need a higher angle, climb to an upper deck of your ship (presumably if you're a serious photo journalist, you're able to secure better than a kayak).
This is a wholly reasonable working and safety margin, and with modern equipment should pose no significant challenges to any photographer who's actually interested in taking a shot.
Having had my Nexus One get the Froyo 2.2 update today, and giving Flash on my handset a try, I think they've accomplished this.
I spent a fair chunk of time on Kongregate playing various Flash games today. Battery usage indicates 66% usage was to power the display, 7% usage to power the cell circuits (cell standby), 5% for Wifi, 4% was the browser, and the rest was miscellaneous other stuff all at lower percentages than this (Android System, my live wallpaper, akmd, phone idle, and so forth).
It never felt clunky or unresponsive. Very minimal battery impact. This is better than most native games! As far as I can tell, mobile Flash doesn't suck for any definition of the word which allows the possibility of Flash not sucking.
Of course this was never the reason Apple refused to allow Adobe to even try. The real reason is that Apple can't charge their 43% App Store levy on Flash based applications. They want a cut of the action for every thing you do with your phone, and HTML5 is a viable alternative for only a subset of what Flash is capable of, so this is just a shell game for them (officially supporting an immature standard which has been years maturing and is still years from maturity, while capitalizing on the gap and competing with might rather than product quality while claiming they're competing on product quality).
But punitive damages if any would consider whether they knew whether there was an issue. It's a lot more evil to knowingly release a detrimental product than to release a product which is later discovered to be detrimental. On the one hand, the company has actively forsaken the health of its customers, while on the other, the company has at least seemed to actively defended their health (presumably the company acts aghast, immediately halts production, and sets up some sort of good will reparations fund).
My company sells a healthcare related product (my opinions are my own and not the company's, yadda yadda). We have a similar obligation to the government, we have agreed to give them the best possible price, and we may never sell it for less than that amount without discounting the price sold to the government as well.
A data entry error a few years ago led to a major distributor getting a trivially better price (somthing like $0.01) than the government. Two different promotions overlapped with each other because of a data entry error (a pricing promo ran a month longer than it was supposed to, and overlapped for a few weeks with a later promo). This ended up being a huge deal, the penalties we had to pay were phenomenal. Well more than the entire profit we had made on that product within two years.
As a result we wrote custom pricing validation for our SAP system which always checks the CDC's price whenever price promotions, quantity discounts, contract prices, or multi-product-discount data are entered, and won't let the user save the new data until either the CDC has had a better price entered for it as well.
Because of the way SAP pricing works (and because we want to run pricing the same way it runs when you place an order rather than trying to optimize it by trying to identify duplicate work and skip it), it basically has to price all affected products individually and in combination with each other at each discount tier for each day in the effective date range of the pricing records. It's very slow. But it's better to pay someone to watch a "Now checking pricing for Dec 12... Now checking pricing for Dec 13..." message scroll slowly by than to risk another two years worth of profit on a product.
There is a difference between parody and libel. GP was merely asserting that you don't get a pass on libel by calling it parody (unless the original piece clearly states it in prelude).
I don't know exactly what the kids posted in this case, so I don't know if it was libelous or just parody. But since the girl created a fake MySpace profile for her principal, making him out to be a pedophile and mentioning a sex act, chances are she came down on the side of libel - that is the principal's reputation may be damaged by what she posted, and a reasonable person may not have necessarily known it was intended in jest.
An anecdote is an incident (as in a one-time occurrence). This is an ongoing positive experience, which has also been shared by those of my friends who have made the same sort of switch.
It's more of a user review and comparison based on first hand experience of both sides of the comparison (thus more balanced than the average user experience). That is to say, this is as meaningful as it gets in terms of device reviews, and I'm not on the fence at all, coming down without hesitation on the side of Android.
Agreed, my iPhone can't compare to my Nexus One. N1 was the most satisfying phone upgrade I've ever bought (even more than my dumb phone to my iPhone).
Oh, wait, you meant to say that iPhone was better? Sorry, I just don't see it.
No, exactly like the iPhone. For example, iPhone has supported tethering since the 3G model (version 3.0), but was disabled by AT&T. There was a short while where you could update the carrier info on the phone and it would enable tethering as a built-in function via either USB or Bluetooth.
The 3.1 update not only disabled this simple work-around, it also locked the phone so you could not downgrade to 3.0. I had an iPhone at the time, and refused to ever install the 3.1 update so I could stick with tethering. I now have a Nexus One, and have never regretted the upgrade. I also bought the N1 directly from Google, and not only did I avoid a new contract, but I'm no longer subject to having my handset intentionally crippled by my carrier.
Replying to myself, it seems like there are different builds for different submodels of the phone. For example the AT&T compatible phone (like I have) doesn't use the same update file as the T-Mobile compatible phone. Haven't had luck finding the EPE54B download yet.
I have the Nexus One, and the attempt to apply this update has my phone apparently complaining that the fingerprint of the file doesn't match.
Fortunately it's not trying to apply the update, and hasn't done anything unfortunate like brick my phone.
I re-downloaded the file and tried it a second time just to be sure something hadn't gone wrong with the download and copy to my SD card.
I believe you're purposely misinterpreting my sentiments. The Gamestop analogy would only be true if Gamestop sold you a game console which can only play games sold by Gamestop, and also they refuse to sell any game which is available for multiple platforms.
The question is one of chain of trust. The proposal on the table is that the App Store has the advantage of providing this chain of trust by its nature, and that it's unusually well suited for this. My contention is that software trust has already been solved in a manner which doesn't require tying a consumer's hands, and that the App Store doesn't offer any advantage over existing models, and has a number of disadvantages unique to itself.
I do think it's the right of the consumer to use a device they purchased in whatever way they want. I think it's the right of the consumer to not be subject to intentional crippling of their hardware on the part of the manufacturer.
I do not think it's the right of the manufacturer to intentionally limit their product in a way meant to prevent the consumer from being able to experience the full range of possibilities in that device unless they have paid the manufacturer for the privilege of doing so.
This isn't hypocritical and is internally consistent. Of course the usual caveats apply: I don't have a problem with a manufacturer blocking illegal uses of a device (so long as they do not block legal uses in the process), and I understand that it's legal for a manufacturer to act in the ways I have proscribed above, but still don't think they have a right to it.
Actually I did choose it. I had an iPhone, and once Android became competitive (version 2.1), I bought a Nexus One.
The problem is that just because I make an informed choice doesn't mean the average consumer is going to. Software freedom (including and especially freedom of choice) is good for the industry at large because it fosters competition. Apple is currently betting that it has enough market share to remove software freedom, and even to dictate what technology is used by the industry at large (they assume they're big enough that they can get people to abandon Flash, and whether or not you like Flash, it's still very bad to have one company tell the entire industry what they can't do).
Even though I've already abandoned Apple, it's their belief that enough people won't do this that they can retain their clout. The industry as a whole is damaged as a result. Further it sets the precedent that a software company can dictate what other software you run on the same device for business reasons rather than for technical ones (i.e. we're not talking software incompatibility, we're talking rejection because they say so). Apple is the first, if they succeed, you can guarantee that other companies will be looking to shut out their competition simply by refusing to let you run the competition's software. The entire thing is creating an atmosphere of anti-competitiveness.
I don't agree. Sure, it's acceptable to have a walled garden, and to even make it the case that by default you can only wander the carefully groomed paths in that space. But if you want to peek over the wall, or even exit the garden, you should be permitted to. Sure, raise a few warning "Oh no's, nobody can tell you whether these apps out there have thorns or not," screens. But don't prevent me from leaving or else what you have is actually a carefully tended prison (it's even called jailbreaking when you exit the approved area).
For especially sensitive apps (eg, banking), most people will generally understand that you should stick to the official app store. But thinking that any entity is immune to fraud being perpetrated against it is naive. We see big corporations like Verisign - whose whole job is to verify identity before issuing a certificate - issuing certificates for people who don't have the proper credentials.
Certainly we have not seen Apple exercising consistency in what it approves and rejects for the app store, so it doesn't seem like they're really looking all that closely anyway.
We've solved issues related to trust a long time ago for SSL (at least as strongly as the walled garden app store solves it); there's no reason to reinvent the wheel here in a way that locks down consumer property against their will.
Android's Market tells you exactly what an app can and can't access before you install it. In order to access certain classes of API, the app has to include this access in its manifest file or the API's aren't available. Examples include location (there are two tiers: rough network-based, and precise GPS based), phone (again, two tiers: phone state [usually to do things like pause music when the phone rings], and the ability to place/receive calls), network access, storage (read or modify SD card contents), SMS, camera access, contact data, calendar, email, phone sleep functions, and so forth.
Those access levels are detailed here:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.permission.html
Certain accesses are considered sensitive, and will be specifically brought to the user's attention before they install the app. Other controls (such as access to the phone's vibrate function) aren't, and although you can look to see if the app uses those functions, you're not bothered to verify that this is ok first.
So if an app wanted to poach your phone number, etc. on Android, it would basically have to advertise to you that it's doing so or it wouldn't have that level of access.
That said, I do wish there was a way to *block* those accesses.
What if my doctor recommends a trip to Jamaica? Or a year-long global cruise?
The problem isn't doctors who make recommendations in good faith, it's that it becomes difficult or impossible to distinguish between good faith recommendations and doctors who are willing to game the system because their practice will have patients waiting in line for an appointment once word gets out.
I doubt the government is thinking that this case is an abuse, they just realize that it's a highly abusable scenario and need to tread cautiously lest they begin subsidizing people's recreation.
So we should just let companies get away with deplorable behavior because there's probably a different company out there who doesn't do it? This is not just a slippery slope, it's a flowing stream (meaning that progression down the slope is not just likely, but inevitable).
Companies will act in self interest over employee interest whenever they think they can get away with it. If we accept some employers requiring people to install certain software on employee home computers as part of their job duty, eventually nearly all employers will do this, and it will be difficult or impossible to find employers who don't. Those who don't will be operating at a competitive disadvantage to those who do.
I'm sorry, "so get a different job" is never an acceptable justification for a company trying to screw an employee. It may be good advice for the employee, but it can't be used to dismiss the employer's actions.