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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

(peabee.substack.com)
1192 points gniting | 3 comments | 29 Mar 25 21:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.409s | source
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djrj477dhsnv ◴[30 Mar 25 03:57 UTC] No.43521208[source]▶
Anyone know if GrapheneOS has protection against this?
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switch007 ◴[30 Mar 25 06:37 UTC] No.43521882[source]▶
It doesn't afaik. Only indirectly through multiple profiles

I was kind of surprised

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/13302-query-all-packages-pe...

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/7800-how-to-mitigate-identi...

Later

For the wider audience: though don't take this as GrapheneOS doesn't care about privacy. I'm sure there are reasons (I didn't read all of the linked threads) and it gives you plenty of other protections and tools - eg profiles, ability to disable all network access by app etc

replies(1): >>43523677 #
fph ◴[30 Mar 25 12:38 UTC] No.43523677[source]▶
A rationale from the core developer [1]:

> I'm sure there are plenty of system APIs providing this information too, and I don't just mean APIs designed to directly provide the information.

> It's not useful to prevent directly getting a list of installed applications without preventing detecting which applications are installed, so this specific feature request has to be rejected. It would have to be part of a larger, much more comprehensive feature preventing apps from finding other apps. That implies outright preventing communication with non-system components which is a much different approach to applications and rules out a lot of things. [...]

> The request should be for preventing apps from discovering which apps are installed, since anything less than that has no privacy / security value. There's no point in disallowing access to a list while not preventing discovering which apps are installed anyway.

The open issue to restrict app visibility is [2].

[1] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/ issues/149#issuecomment-553590002 [2] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/2197

replies(1): >>43524662 #
1. djrj477dhsnv ◴[30 Mar 25 14:53 UTC] No.43524662[source]▶
I get what he's saying, but still seems like blocking the easy way of getting a list of apps, while certainty not perfect, would prevent most privacy abuse.
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2. aucisson_masque ◴[30 Mar 25 15:53 UTC] No.43525109[source]▶
Yes.

Privacy is not an on off switch, it's about making things leak data less.

I really don't understand grapheneos development sometimes, like when they refuse to make a setting to invert the back and recent button. Yes it's not part of AOSP but it's so simple to do and a feature that all manufacter offer because people want it, refusing to do that is weird imo.

3. fph ◴[02 Apr 25 06:52 UTC] No.43554256[source]▶
Would it? My understanding is that most fingerprinting is done by a few large companies, in their own proprietary libraries that are shipped with third-party apps. If you block this method, they will quickly find another one and ship it everywhere, because that is their core business.

With browser fingerprinting, the ad companies are already regularly pulling many shenanigans; I don't see a reason why this would be different.