Daily Archives: 2022-07-21

Google’s adding the app permissions section back to the Play Store after removing it

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Good. Doing _anything_ that makes data-exfiltrating bullshit harder to see and resist is suspect.
It’s rolling back a change it made last week. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google says it’s rolling back its decision to remove a section from the Play Store that listed which permissions an app uses. The company had more or less replaced that info with its Data Safety section, which is supposed to give you an idea of what data apps are collecting and how that data is used.

The problem, as several commentators pointed out, is that the information in the Data Safety section came from developers, whereas the app permissions section was generated by Google. By removing it, Google made it impossible for users to do a quick fact-check by comparing the two sections or to use the info from both to get a more complete picture of what an app is up to and what it has access to.

In a Twitter thread on Thursday spotted by...

Continue reading…

Posted in News | Leave a comment