There’s an app for just about anything these days, whether you’re looking to pay some bills, looking to read the latest books or hear the newest music, or with legislation change looking to place a bet or gamble on the likes of Delaware online gambling – despite the growing availability, apps have been coming under a lot of scrutiny lately as online privacy and data sharing concerns continue to grow. In a surprise move by many, Apple actually took the first steps to reduce this when earlier in the year they released an iOS update to offer more transparency on which permissions apps were requesting, how this would impact users, and placed restrictions on what data could be taken from devices too – but is this something that Google may look to follow with Android?
(Image from theverge.com)
The biggest difference is simply the prompts that are offered, with the update delivered by Apple you’re always warned about exactly what may be used and how to disable these specific features whilst also ensuring that no feature is mandatory – there’s no reason your calculator should have access to your phone and camera for example, and you should still be able to use it without those permissions. Since the change, Google have been relatively quiet on the subject about making any big changes in a similar way, it can tend to be a little simpler as the huge number of Android phones mean there are also big differences between the exact software that runs on the device and also means that individuals can make changes themselves where as Apple devices can be a bit more restrictive here, but there’s also still the expectation that a blanket change should be on the way to ensure that the practices that have made modern apps a little tricky to navigate can’t continue to take advantage.
Change is certainly on the way though, there’s no doubt that Android will start to issue similar warnings and wider reaching changes to better protect user data and the permissions given as well as likely more instruction and information on what exactly these permissions mean and the negative impact they can have, as more of our day to day is reliant on a huge library of apps there will certainly be methods employed to catch users out and ensuring that all protections are in place ahead of time will save many headaches further down the line, but may also go further to protect Google and Android from having to deal with issues that continue to appear with this problem – for now, common sense tends to play the prevalent roll, but it may certainly not be a responsibility of the user and more of a focus on the developer to ensure these measures are fool proof.