On the flip side, its important to know just how much we would be sacrificing if big frontier gets their way in convincing the courts that distillation is a bad thing
This! So many times have I hit one of the keys in the row above space. I think this might actually be caused by them resizing the hitbox because I am not that fat-fingered.
Need to rethink the system that allows for (and encourages) this kind of plausible deniability. From "Oh we need this permission for [non essential feature] and you need to accept it if you want the app at all" -> to giving the user ultimate control over what happens on their personal device. Virtualize what the app can see and use fake data/identifiers/devices if necessary to get it to do what its supposed to. If the App isn't going to act in good faith why should the user? Fine grained permissions don't really work in practice because the app can keep annoying the user until they give in and hit Allow.
Also perhaps AI agents are now capable enough to run these apps the way the user would and recognize these dark patterns. Flag those and feed it back to a warning at the point of sale that users can upvote there to signal their disapproval and a threshold score that risks removal of the app from the store. Because bad behaviour continues to make business sense if the rules allow it. Moreover, it penalizes and puts pressure on the good actors as a "missed business opportunity".
Maybe just have Claude rebuild the app in a non-scummy way. Analyze the site for the relevant data APIs, while avoiding the tracking stuff. Maybe someone maintains an MCP for these popular websites so people can use agents on them.
What you want is basically how it works. On both phone platforms and PWAs, all permissions are visible to the user explicitly. All of them can be revoked at any time. Apps are disallowed from requesting an already-denied permission.
Obviously apps can tell if they haven't been granted a permission (even if you tried to fake this, they aren't dummies and will know if it's not working), and obviously third party software isn't under any obligation to work without them.
But the platforms have done what the platforms can do, at the architecture side, really. The next stage is human-audited enforcement of malware, which this AliExpress nonsense might hopefully run afoul of.
> Obviously apps can tell if they haven't been granted a permission (even if you tried to fake this, they aren't dummies and will know if it's not working),
How can they tell? For the permissions I can think of: location, filesystem, etc. it should be easy to lie/spoof.
That does nothing but start an arms race. Fine, audio "works" but do you get noise? Can you read back the sounds you play? No, right? It doesn't work, QED. Now the platform needs to fake the noise.
Likewise for any other hardware access you want, and most of them are harder. How do you fake local storage without storing anything? How do you fake Bluetooth access without virtualizing an entire device? Do you fake the screen dimensions to look like something else? Input latency? Where does it stop?
No, "does this work" is among the easiest questions to answer in technology. We aren't going to win this war.
No, but you also can’t do that if the user approves your app’s permission to play audio, but has the volume permanently turned down to zero.
> local storage
Give the app a temporary, space-constrained store that isn’t shared with other apps.
> bluetooth
Don’t let apps access raw bluetooth signals, but instead ask the platform to display a pairing interface (possibly with a custom stylesheet), ask the platform to call you back when a specific device is in range, etc.
> screen dimensions
Not personal data.
> input latency
Fudge the numbers even when the user grants permission.
This isn’t a war, it’s just engineering for the benefit and autonomy of the user, and not the platforms’ commercial interests.
Fingerprinting and other quasi-malware techniques being used by desirable third party software are absolutely a war, otherwise we wouldn't have this permission structure in place in the first place. And as much as you believe the contrary, Alibaba et. al. are 100% smarter than you about how to exploit these tricks and will win.
I don’t appreciate the personal attack. You don’t know me.
Permissions have nothing to do with preventing fingerprinting, they have to do with user control. Every permission you add that the app can inspect is one extra bit of fingerprint, so it’s actually worse.
In TFA’s case, if the app was simply not hooked up to an actual audio sink, they would still be able to use this mechanism for fingerprinting, since it’s the processing pipeline itself that leaves the fingerprint.
Note that the article isn’t calling out for fingerprinting specifically. I’m sure AliExpress does more fingerprinting than this. The problem is specifically that they’re interfering with multipoint Bluetooth audio.
The best you can do on the modern web is reduce your fingerprint footprint, though it comes at a cost of websites breaking from JS disabling, or local time zone anonymisation.
Soundd like a nightmare to build legitimate apps if you for example are building an app that uses the camera but you can’t in anyway tell that using the camera fails (because user had denied the permission 6 months ago and has no memory of it) and instead of being able to give a helpful error you are just ending up with I am guessing fake images (maybe just a black screen).
Just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try. What about a popup saying "xyz has tried to access the camera a lot lately, continue blocking?"? Or apps can apply for set of 'core permissions' that can't be denied but are much more tightly controlled? Apple and Google are some of the biggest companies in the world, they don't deserve as much leeway as you're offering.
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