Comment by swozey
1 day ago
I've been doing forest service stuff for a year with almost no signal and often no gps without antenna and it's incredible what asks for location permission to run. My amazon bought LEDs (15+, 3-5 diff types) all check location before I can connect them. I wind up waiting 30 seconds sometimes more to turn lights on. My generator and inverter have to phone home so that lags constantly.
Also I've been shadowbanned from a bunch of social media sites and had problems with payment systems, etc because Starlink confuses companies tracking user locations to geoips etc.
Won't even get into the apps that look downloaded and usable until you open them with no signal and they don't work before phoning home.
I've been meaning to go through ALL my apps and delete everything I don't use, I haven't installed a new app in years.
Then you have MacOS now that has the most "wtf" level permission prompts that make you think everything is phoning home or trying to access stuff on your network when it's just connecting bluetooth devices or something daily. I don't know how many games I've installed that now show up as having full screen or keyboard control permissions just to use input devices. I work on this stuff and can deduce what it's doing, especially after googling it, but "Stupidgame needs control of your system" is wild to someone who doesn't, I'm sure.
I've been wondering if it's almost nefarious that they want to get people used to allowing these seemingly system wide controls to be given to.. everything, by hiding the security-ok things behind a giant red flag warning.
Sorry went on a tangent. I miss specific permissions notifications I can trust.
edit: Oh, my "fix" for most of this is fakegps and mocking my android systemwide gps location to whatever, if you go through this.
Android's permission system conflates the Bluetooth scanning permission with the "Fine location" permission, because in theory any app that can enumerate nearby Bluetooth devices (including things like nearby Bluetooth Low Energy beacons commonly found in stores and malls) could use that information to locate your phone within a few hundred feet.
It seems like there's a newer build option to explicitly disable the "Fine location" permission prompt while still being able to scan for Bluetooth devices, but such beacons are somehow filtered from the list if it's enabled, and it's only available for builds targeting newer Android versions.
I'm sure at least some of those macOS permissions prompts are spurious, but for the most part I think they're genuine red flags of poor software quality if not actual security/privacy threats. When a video game prompts for full disk access, it's probably because it wants to spray config and save files all over my home directory instead of putting them in a platform-appropriate location. When it triggers a permissions prompt about Bluetooth, it's probably using the wrong API to get input from a game controller or the wrong API for identifying what kind of input devices are present. If it triggers the "wants to control your system" prompt, it's probably trying to keep responding to input even when it's no longer the foreground application.
Sometimes the right API might not actually exist, but most of the time it's just lazy developers half-assing a port with no care for making the application behave appropriately for the platform. The prevalence of "Please don't turn off your computer while the game is saving" warnings is pretty clear proof that game devs in particular don't make any platform-specific adjustments they aren't forced to. (Game consoles usually require those warnings, but they're stupidly out of touch on a computer.)
My point is that the notifications are less specific now, so whether or not someone is being a normal dev, which nearly all if not all of them are in my experience, you still get a giant "FULL DISK ACCESS" because a game wants access to your download directory or something ridiculous. The errors used to be worth stopping to check things for. The OS shouldn't be scaring a user from running an application that broadly, they just become red herring alerts that people stop paying attention to.
You're of course correct in the os APIs, etc, my frustration comes when you're modding games and what not and the Apple notifications make it sound like you're giving your system to the app, when it IS acting for the low permission.
i prefer the macos mindset if not the actual OS
I just looked and I think what I'm talking about, where they folded more specific permission callouts under a broad term "Full disk access" "local devices" etc used to be more granular before they updated that UI to match the iphone. If I got a jumpscare permission prompt on macos, I used to actually be concerned. Now they're all jumpscares for basic stuff.
But I could be misremembering. I haven't liked any of the recent macos releases. I will begrudgingly install Golden Gate to hopefully fix my m1 max 64gb slowing ot a crawl with Tahoe.
If you really want to see what is doing what, you should install Little Snitch and Little Flocker. Many apps (from exactly the people you'd expect) are doing absolutely unhinged nonsense that no-one should put up with.
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yeah i mean security is opposite to convenience until it is really really not
Ah, most of the people just click yes, yes, allow, allow, yesIamsure, next. Especially when the system is training them to do exatly this by these meaningless warnings you described.
The forest job sounds nice :)