A good step.

Apple's own apps are still blessed with permissions that other apps have to ask for. This needs to be addressed too.

Baloney I don’t see anything in these laws that actually stops the onward march of companies effing the customers. All I see is the move to have give equal access to effing the customer even more.

They are doing nothing to stop the endless ads, and the pop-ups in the browser I want to kill turn them off not them grant equal access to have even more ads.

Another problem is the onward, march towards renting leasing, owning nothing endless upgrades for price, in the end I don’t expect a bunch of lawyers and bureaucrats to do anything about that. They have been paid off long time ago.

Recently in the last couple of years in particular it’s gotten to be completely out of control. I’m glad I bought a super drive before Apple discontinued it soon the way things are going you won’t even be able to have a large drive or even big memory you’ll be tied to that remote data center…

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giancarlostoro 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me it depends on which app and which permissions, like "Photos" obviously needs to be able to see my photos... Camera needs my camera, but for location it should ask me before it turns it on.

I don't even care if they make the dialogue look a little different since they're system apps you need to use the features of your phone, but the "extras" they support should default to "Ask First" in an ideal world that is.

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greggman65 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The Photos app does not need permission any more than any other Photos app. It can ask "Photos app wants to access your photos" and you can click "Always", "Selected Photos", "No" and download some other app to access your photos. That would be the "equal" thing to do. Let the user pick what app they want to access their photos with.

Same with the Camera App. It can ask "Camera App wants to access your Camera" and you can say "No" and then download some other camera app and make that your default and grant it camera permission.

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mook an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember somebody trying to hook into the Apple Find My network (that is, do things with AirTags). They did that by… being a Mail.app plug-in or something to get the correct entitlements? That certainly sounds like the wrong permissions.

Ah, it was OpenHaystack: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack#installation

	▲	whstl an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, wow, haven't heard of Apple Mail plugins in a decade! I really thought Apple would have deprecated them by now. Mail plugins are kind of a special case, they're REALLY "legacy", so they work by sharing process memory and being able to access way more than they should, like all your messages, possibly even passwords if the developer is clever enough. Also notoriously difficult to build, since the Mail internal API breaks from time to time, so they're a rarity these days. Also notoriously difficult to install.

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blululu an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fair, but when a 3p app has camera in the name and app description then why does it need to ask permission to use the camera? *just to be clear I think that the stock camera app not asking for camera permission is fine but skipping permission about location tracking is wrong. Having the same standard should be applied to both 1p and 3p apps feel like a fair way to ensure that good practices are used in 1p apps and good policies are use in the 3p ecosystem

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bzzzt 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> like "Photos" obviously needs to be able to see my photos...

Maybe you'd like to use a competitor to the Photos app and don't want to use the one Apple provides?

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cedilla an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe.

But what does the "Access to photos" permission really do here? It's not like not having that permission would stop Apple from accessing them against your will, as they have access via the OS anyway. And it's clear, that when you open the Apple Photos app, that it will access your photos.

On the other hand, when you open a third party app, it may not have been clear to you that it wants to access your photos, and the company did not have prior access to them.

I still think apps should only be pre-blessed sparingly. For example, the camera app should not have GPS permission by default, as many people probably aren't aware that camera apps use that information.

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whstl an hour ago | parent [-]

Tangential but:

"Access to Photos" is a complicated one: Lots of apps only needs this permission when building a custom photo selector. Like Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram do, also Slack.

For every other app, they can use the system's default photo picker and it works without permission.

For example, the "Lunch Receipt Scanner" that my company uses: I'm happy to allow it on my phone, as it saves a lot of time, but I wouldn't want a company app having access to my entire camera roll!!!

I personally also don't like that WhatsApp/Instagram/Facebook/Slack asks for access to the whole album just to display the photo picker, but I'm pretty sure some designer or product manager made a strong case for it internally. (EDIT: Not saying having a case justifies it, I'm more lamenting the situation)

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datadrivenangel 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

And those product designers who violate privacy that badly should be personally liable imo.

	▲	whstl 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I agree 100%.

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AlexandrB an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> I personally also don't like that WhatsApp/Instagram/Facebook/Slack asks for access to the whole album just to display the photo picker, but I'm pretty sure some designer or product manager made a strong case for it internally.

Main reason I don't use the in-app photo pickers for these but "share" the photo I want to upload from Photos into the app. Zero trust for these companies.

	▲	whstl 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yep I do the same. Also zero trust from my side.

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giancarlostoro an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That should be supported, but if its the only "Photo Gallery" app installed, I think its okay. Curious, do you use another one that's better? I have looked (though not very invested in looking) and didn't really see anything that caught my eye.

	▲	greggman65 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I can certainly imagine one that's better. One that catelogs all the images using better AI that apples and lets me do complex searches "Dog at beach", "Joey in red shirt with Jane"

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Zagitta an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well you could argue all bundled OS apps should have a dialog similar to the browser selection Microsoft was forced to implement.

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jacquesm an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The nasty bit about location services is that it is trivially easy to turn it on but much harder to turn it off.

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vonneumannstan 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

>Apple's own apps are still blessed with permissions that other apps have to ask for. This needs to be addressed too.

This is a strange position imo. Why would we expect third party apps written by totally unknown people with unknown goals to have the same permissions as apps written by Apple itself?