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Android is FACC
Android might be many things, but certainly not "privacy first". At least not if you want to use Google Playstore as a ressource for your apps. While at creation (initialization) of your google-account on your Android device, you are asked "Do you want to store your data with Google?", this only means "Backups of your apps and their data, as ...
25
The Chrome page in the app store says this about the new permissions:
This version requests two new permissions, Camera and Modify Audio Settings, to support WebRTC, an experimental feature under development.
WebRTC itself is designed to expose your camera and mic to the browser, so that web-apps can implement video-conferencing and other multimedia ...
18
This question has been bothering me quite some time. So now, finally, I decided to get to the bottom of the issue.
The Playstore has an app named permission.READ_PHONE_STATE, which requests READ_PHONE_STATE as the only permission, and does nothing else than printing out all data it can access with or without using it. I've installed that on my LG Optimus 4X,...
18
Remove the SD Card and SIM Card, and then do a Factory Reset.
If your device doesn't use full disk encryption, and you are worried about someone using advanced forensic tools to recover your data, you might want to overwrite the internal storage area with random data. You can do this by creating a file containing random data that fills up the entire free ...
16
General information
You might want to take a look at What do the permissions that applications require mean? -- our "community wiki" which hopefully becomes such a ressource one day. Next to that, you might want to take a look at App Permissions Explained – What Do They Really Mean?, a blog article at AndroidPIT giving at least some short explanations.
...
15
This is available for phones starting in Android 5.0 (Lollipop):
http://www.android.com/versions/lollipop-5-0/
And for tablets starting in Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean):
http://developer.android.com/about/versions/jelly-bean.html#42-multiuser
As Tatjana Heuser mentioned, it's also available as hidden functionality in Android 4.1, but not accessible through the ...
13
XPrivacyLua is a module for Xposed framework which does exactly what you need. It is free and open source. Works on rooted devices. It's the successor of XPrivacy.
Install Xposed from here:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=3034811
You can then download the XPrivacyLua module from the Xposed repo through the Xposed Manager app, or manually ...
13
Yes, it can, but only on Android 4.3 and lower. This is used for example in Whatsapp. When you activate the app, Whatsapp sends an SMS to the number you reported, and the app intercepts it quietly and reports to the servers that it has received the SMS. This is how the account is tied to your number.
Of course, this can be used in harmful apps also. If an ...
13
In Windows, if you open Manage password in Chrome, then it asks for a master password (i.e. Windows Admin password) to view and manage your passwords. But that's not the case in Android. So for security purposes, Chrome for Android doesn't reveal the password.
From Greenbot: Saving your passwords to your device presents some obvious security
issues. ...
13
Verification by OTP uses a different API which doesn't need read SMS permission. You can read more here Perform SMS Verification on a Server
Hence, the app isn't reading your SMS but using a separate channel to read specially formatted text messages
I learnt of this when an Xposed module to block permissions did not work as I expected (similar case) and ...
12
I doubt there's an answer to this beyond "because that's how Google designed its apps". Android itself does not require a Google account to use, only Google's proprietary applications do. CyanogenMod and other pure source builds of Android are actually forbidden from distributing the Google apps within the firmware package itself because of their proprietary ...
11
This is a feature of CDMA (standardized in IS-95) and is called Voice Privacy.
See an Analysis of IS-95 CDMA Voice Privacy by M.Zhang, et al. from 2000, free download here
Citation (the real paper begins at p.10 in the PDF:
Abstract. The voice privacy of IS-95 CDMA cellular system is analyzed
in this paper. By exploiting information redundancy on the ...
11
A factory reset reformats the phone's user-data partition, but it's not a "secure" wipe; it doesn't overwrite everything with zeroes. If you want to be sure everything is erased, you can encrypt the phone first (which overwrites all the data with encrypted versions of itself), then do a factory reset (which sets up a new unencrypted filesystem).
(Update: ...
11
Not exactly matching your description (using the "last known" position if not GPS available), but still a good alternative:
On two of my devices, I completely got rid of all proprietary Google services, replacing them by alternatives. In detail, I've described this in Android without Google 5: Free your Droid!¹ (update¹). In short, this is what I've done:
...
10
Many ad publishers use this permission to get the Phone ID for all sorts of tracking purposes. There are other ways to get a unique ID, but unfortunately they are buggy in older Android versions (the story is more complicated, see e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2785485/is-there-a-unique-android-device-id or http://android-developers.blogspot.com/...
10
I don't think there is a good way to do this - the issue isn't that the private number is being hidden by your phone, it's that the phone company isn't transmitting the caller id info to you at all. So there shouldn't be any way for you to get that data working strictly from your phone.
Unless you know people who regularly block caller ID data, but don't ...
10
As things stand
Android 4.3 and below without Hangouts app : Any app with
SMS_RECEIVE permission can read/abort an incoming SMS (ala Whatsapp)
Android 4.3 and below with Hangouts (SMS mode turned on) : Any app
with SMS_RECEIVE permission can read but not abort an incoming SMS
Android 4.4 and above : Any app with SMS_RECEIVE permission can read
but not ...
9
Not an absolute solution to your problem, but there is an app in the android market which caters to your needs. It also necessarily requires better knowledge about permissions and also a rooted device.
Permissions Denied is an app which allows you to effectively control the permissions that apps which are installed onto your phone, via the market or some ...
9
Apps can get your approximate location without GPS, but only if they have the "coarse location" permission. The "fine location" permission lets an app get your GPS location too, if GPS is enabled.
When you an install an app, Android shows you the permissions it needs. If you don't see coarse or fine location in the list, the app can't get your location.
9
You don't need to sign into Google. But without access to the Play Store, you do limit the apps you can install on your phone. Many apps are available in alternative stores like Amazon, but I don't think they have all of them. When you first start up the phone, it should ask you for your existing Google or to create a new one. There should be a skip option ...
9
You could try this app: GPS Aids.
It tries to provide a quicker and more stable fix by providing a couple of GPS aids (GPS Aiding Data like LTO Long Term Orbits, gpsOneXTRA and AGPS), and it caches your last known GPS data.
It will run without root, but some options require root access.
9
Configuring captive portal behaviour
captive_portal_detection_enabled (<= Android 7.1.1)
works as described in question body
captive_portal_mode (>= Android 7.1.2)
works as described in question body
Setting captive portal URL(s)
captive_portal_server (<= Android 6.0.1)
The server that holds a generate_204 page, used to internally craft a URL ...
8
Supporting multiple users has been discussed before, and I think that it is something that is needed as well. If I buy a tablet, and set it up for my email, calendar, etc. I don't want that device to be a community device. Which would mean that multiple tablets would be needed in a family household.
A problem with being able to support multiple users is the ...
8
SwitchMe app just appeared featuring profiles for root users. The free version is able to manage 2 profiles. In order to manage more profiles you need to buy the key for around 3$. SwitchMe needs, not surprisingly, root.
SwitchMe is a unique application for root users that allows you to log
in and out of multiple installations of Android just as you ...
8
Similar to Permissions Denied, mentioned by Matthew is LBE Privacy Guard which also allows you to selectively disable permissions for apps. Also good for disabling geo-tagging on your photos as well as preventing Facebook and/or Twitter from broadcasting your location.
8
Here is QR Droid Private. It does not access your contact information.
Usually the reason they want contact access is because you can store contact information in a QR code. So when scanned, it sees that it is a contact and adds it to your contacts. without access to your contacts, it would not be able to do this. Another reason is that some of the apps ...
8
Voice Privacy is something that is part of CDMA. I found this article that talks a little bit about it in the introduction.
Voice privacy of IS-95 CDMA is provided by means of the long code
mask.The long code mask is not transmitted through any channel, it is
constructedby the base station and the mobile station. To recover the
long code sequence,...
8
Yes, but the application has to request the LOCATION_COARSE permission.
This uses a couple different sources used to find the approximate location.
Wifi access points: Google tracks the location of access points by gathering information about them when people have GPS on. Then they can use these access points to tell you where you are when you don't have ...
7
Stock Android doesn't offer ability to disallow apps use of specific permissions. At install time, once you agree to accept whatever permissions the app requests - you are stuck with them unless you uninstall the app.
Since you are rooted, you can try using Tasker to automate enabling of GPS only when using certain apps like Maps, and disabling it when the ...
7
With LBE Privacy Guard you can block positioning permissions for certain apps.
You can download it here: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.lbe.security.lite
It is important to note that LBE does require your phone to be rooted.
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