Privacy features in Touch (cyanogenmod)?

[Matt B.]

It's not "nefarious" traffic I'm necessarily looking for. The fact that an App is even connecting to the internet can alert me to an App's bad behavior. For example, starting up a Podcast client causes it to connect to the internet. I don't want this--I'm starting the client just to listen to Podcasts I manually added to phone. So I go into app and look to configure the app not to connect to internet. If there is no setting to allow this I will likely uninstall the App and look for something else.

Same with a music player. If I start the App and it connects to the internet, I look for how to stop this. If I can't I will often uninstall the App. There are many Apps that I use that do not need to connect to the internet. So it is helpful to have a way to verify they are not connecting.

People do get charged for data use, especially on phones so I think this becomes an even more important issue on phones to give users control and awareness over App internet usage behavior. 

The fact that so many Apps use the internet is because of abuse/bad design. Data usage plans wouldn't be so expensive if everyone using a phone wasn't connecting to the internet for stuff they don't even know about or care about.

Many Apps use the internet when they shouldn't. The designers just assume the internet is free, but it especially is not on a phone. Plus being able to control internet access has many privacy/security concerns in general even if the connection attempt is NOT "nefarious" per se. Being able to control internet access is not about stopping "malware" from calling home. it's about knowing which Apps are outgoing, whether nefarious or innocent. I will act on "innocent" Apps accessing the internet the same as I would for a "nefarious" app--it's about the connection behavior not what's it's trying to do.



> Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2013 10:41:43 +0100
> From: mpt at canonical.com
> To: ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com
> Subject: Re: Privacy features in Touch (cyanogenmod)?
> 
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> Matt B. wrote on 03/07/13 15:00:
> > ...
> > 
> > I too am concerned about a lot of "are you sure" dialogs. I think 
> > people are just looking for a way to learn/know what apps are 
> > connecting to the internet (and why). Like I described how VLC
> > asks to connect for downloading album art/info and tells you why it
> > would be connecting to the internet. Once the user responds to this
> > dialogue there are no more dialogues--ever. The App asks for
> > permission to connect to the internet for a specific purpose. If
> > the user says No, it would be up to the user to go into settings
> > and reset this. The user should not be presented this prompt each
> > time the App starts/runs.
> 
> With the Ubuntu Touch model, the prompt is shown once ever, not once
> each time the app runs. (You shouldn't need to know whether an app is
> not "running" anyway.)
> 
> However, an app accessing the Internet is not currently on the list of
> things that the OS would prompt about. It could be, but I'm not
> confident it would be useful. Such a large proportion of apps use the
> Internet, that nefarious traffic would often be hidden alongside
> legitimate traffic.
> 
> > ...
> > 
> > So I think the most useful OS service is to somehow *give users 
> > awareness of App internet connection behavior* so users CAN learn 
> > that they need to make a settings adjustment IN THE APP or simply 
> > uninstall the App and look for one that isn't so promiscuous with
> > the internet. This I think is the privacy/security function of the
> > OS that is so important--providing some means of "finding out"
> > which Apps are connecting to the internet, which informs the user
> > and allows him/her to decide whether to adjust settings in the App
> > or uninstall it.
> > 
> > ...
> 
> This is part of the reason I designed the network activity indicator.
> <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Networking#phone-indicator>
> 
> - -- 
> mpt
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