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What information about the phone is available to an app without extra permissions?

E.g., if the app asks for permission to see my contacts, and I agree, it will see all my contacts (obviously).

However, what is available without asking?

MAC address? MEID/IMEI? IP address? model/make? available storage / number of user photos? phone number? provider? what other apps are installed?

Ideally -- is there an app that would just show everything that is available to it?

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  • You can get a lot of information from the system without any permissions, For example, i built an application a while ago and i learned a way to bypass some permissions like Internet Availability, Device Information Collection and others ... OK usually when your developing an application you'd ask for permissions to have access to the network for checking an active connection, however this can be bypassed by checking the information of system components that already has access..It possible to get device ID, Device Serial Number, Device Network Status, Device Capabilities, Device Partition Info
    – Empire of E
    Mar 29, 2018 at 21:04
  • ** continued ** default storage device, currently running services, encrypted storage name, device manufacturer, (device name,make and model) manufacturing dates, internet availability, sim card status and a whole bunch of other information that i couldn't possibly write.
    – Empire of E
    Mar 29, 2018 at 21:41
  • For some examples, see my answer here.
    – Izzy ♦
    Mar 29, 2018 at 21:41

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Their is plenty of information available to your application without using any permissions whatsoever, it wouldn't be possible to write every single file that your application has access to in this answer but i can give you a rough idea.

Applications usually require some useless permissions like checking for network availability, this can be done in several way without using the permission, let's say that you had a simple WebView that accessed a website, Instead of using the permission to check for an active connection, we could just try to open the website and capture the errors, if the error show's that the page couldn't be loaded because of a DNS issue or a network not available message, then most likely your device isn't connected to the internet and you then have the network status without using the permission.

I made an application that collects partition information for building scatter files without using any root access by reading system configuration files and collecting the information MTK Scatter Builder You should get a good idea on what's available by using the crawl for information button inside the application.

As for your contacts, their is probably a way around using the permission.

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