Hey there, I'm head of user privacy on the Intel side of things.

First off, for HTML5, here are the granular permissions that can be
granted to apps, as defined in the WAC specification :
http://specs.wacapps.net/core/#permissions

The WAC permission model is a bit simpler than Android's permission
model, but then again, earlier permission models in Android were
simple too, and then for various reasons they needed to break
permissions up for finer granularity.

This topic has actually been a frequent point of discussion.  When you
buy an app, how visible should all these permissions be?  Should you
be able to uncheck them as you are buying the app?  How much due
diligence should there be on our end to make sure that users really
know what they are giving up when they allow an app more access to
their device?  Should we at Intel / Samsung make these decisions, or
should the appstore owners, OEMs, or the carriers?

I am not the ultimate decider of these things, but I would advocate
for detailed descriptions of permissions, along with links that give
informative examples of what apps need this permission for, and how it
might be abused.  I would also love it if you could remove checkmarks
and deny permissions as you install, as well as retaining the ability
to manually revoke individual permissions of an app at a later time.
Of course, the UI flow here would be sightly more cumbersome than some
people might like, but I would love to see this type of granularity in
the future.

My favorite idea that I have come up with to slow down permission
bloat is for appstores to charge developers an additional 1-2% of
their profits per requested permission, but that idea hasn't gained
too much traction :-)

I think the most important thing is that a user feels comfortable with
what their phone is doing, and that goes beyond just educating users.
In a perfect world users would see the short snippets of text, and
understand intuitively exactly what they are enabling.  We aren't
quite there yet, but hopefully we can keep moving towards that goal.

  - DEAN


On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 9:08 PM, olivier nyssen <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I just read this interesting article about mobile app permissions and
> privacy:
> http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2012/08/infographic-pay-attention-to-mobile-app-permissions.php
>
> How can we avoid these problems with mobile HTML5 apps ?
>
> Cheers,
> Olivier
>
> _______________________________________________
> General mailing list
> [email protected]
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