I don't understand why internet access isn't opt-in for apps. Preventing exfiltration would prevent much of this harm, and most apps don't have any need to access the internet in the first place. Why am I creating a GE account to read my blood pressure? At least I know it's taking advantage of me. But this is clearly abusive behavior
Because 99% of apps would request it & not function without it, desensitising users into blindly accepting it. Most apps do have a legitimate reason for accessing the internet, so a binary yes/no wouldn’t achieve much anyway.
I just don’t think it’s an effective way of solving the problem.
The internet access permission should be implemented. Users of macOS are already accustomed to the local network access permission.
Even if it's not the most effective way to raise awareness, it does put pressure on developers to be explicit about the connectivity requirements with users. It would also be a great way to audit an app's local-first / offline-first claim without having to do a network packet capture.
Want telemetry? Send it through Apple and Google. Given Apple's late history and latest trends in Android development, I see them both favoring this approach.
"99% of apps would request it & not function without it"
Apple could refuse to publish them, then. Isn't that why we are forced to go through the App Store? Because Apple ensures every app there works in the best interest of the user?
Permission should be in the form of a capability, which need not end up on the built-in OS network capability. If an app insists on your car's steering wheel, you can be like "sure, kid, here's your Help Daddy Drive(TM)".
Almost all of the apps you mentioned sync data to, or access data from iCloud in the vast majority of use cases. I mention iCloud here because this submission is about iOS.
That said, I'd love to have a new "Internet access" permission for apps, so users had the choice. Perhaps even separate "Allow iCloud" and "Allow Internet" but that's probably too granular for Apple's taste.
For that case, iOS could just run a system daemon to shuttle the app data to/from iCloud. The app itself should not need internet access for this.
I have no idea if this is what already happens, but I feel like it might be. (Why would each app have all these network connections when the system could just manage it instead?)
>most apps don't have any need to access the internet in the first place.
It would severely depend on how you categorize "most apps" because I would say I pretty much only use apps that need the Internet, barring Calculator, Camera, and a PDF reader (only because I prefer how it zooms books vs browser. Everything else implicitly needs the Internet as that app is just a better UI to using their mobile web site, if they even offer one.
Apps are more than just a gateway to content. Your phone is also useful as a tool in itself. Most health, hardware, creative, and productivity apps do not need access to the internet. Even downloading, say, content packs could be done via icloud if apple cared about privacy. Syncing with icloud and not some rando company's probably insecure webapp is a great deal of the appeal of an app store in the first place.
This isn't effective because Little Snitch only sees the domains so apps can just serve the trackers on the same domain as essential services making blocking impossible.
The only way to prevent malicious apps from affecting your privacy is to not install them or not give them network access.
Yeah but it might be because you are part of a minority. Once/if this is built into the OS, the app builders will have a strong incentive to do things differently.
They don’t because there is no reason to currently.
If this was added then they would have a reason to and do it.
YouTube used to be separate domains for ads and then it got merged together so that you can’t block the ads network wide without blocking YouTube videos.
If I remember correctly iPhone apps used to use the devices SSL certificates so you as a user could install your own and man-in-the-middle the traffic to see what was being sent. AFAIK now the apps use certificate pinning.
Certificate pinning is actually rarer today than it was a few years ago. You see it mostly in bank apps, and some system services. It’s not a best practice.
iPhones purchased in mainland China (with model number ending in CH/A) do provide options for setting per-app Internet access permissions. There are three options [0]: Off, WLAN only, WLAN and Cellular.
i got an old EU market redmi (yes im broke) and you can turn off either wifi or cellular or both for any non system app. remember apple had to put in work to actively block the feature outside of china.
Because exposed, non-private, abused by-default is a business model. The company is incentivised to not provide restricted access - otherwise you can't have a cut from apps revenue. It's defective by design.
Shocked to see iPhones sold in China are less defective by design on this one point, from another comment. It has surely reduced Genius Bar visits but it’s also harmed my privacy.
AOSP has network as a regular permission for apps, so on Lineage at least (idk about Graphene as I haven't used it) you can disable network for any app including google play services etc. I have no idea why most phone companies remove this permission from their roms but android itself supports it perfectly fine.
It's nice to be able to toggle it (it's also possible to revoke this permission on GrapheneOS). However, it is imperfect, since apps within the same profile can still communicate through IPC, so if apps cooperate, network access can still be achieved. I would guess that Play Services is one of the larger offenders, since many apps communicate with Play Services and as far as I understand (but I may be mistaken) Play Services does work that involves internet access on behalf of other apps.
You could of course disable network access to Play Services, but at least for me that broke a bunch of apps or made them unreliable.
What AOSP ROMs need besides the network permission toggle is IPC scopes functionality, akin to storage scopes.
Profiles are a thing in "stock" Android too, they just don't have the toggle to disallow them working in the background, the "Install available apps" option and Google services also keep working across profiles.
If you want something less disruptive for isolation, there's Private Space. What I like is that this can stop apps there from working in the background on stock Android as well.
> However, it is imperfect, since apps within the same profile can still communicate through IPC, so if apps cooperate, network access can still be achieved.
Folks brings up 'IPC' as if this is some chink in the armour in AOSP. It isn't. 'Apps' pretty much on most consumer OSes can 'IPC' their way with other co-operating apps to 'achieve' network access from behind a firewall, just the same.
> since many apps communicate with Play Services and as far as I understand (but I may be mistaken) Play Services does work that involves internet access on behalf of other apps
If the OS or its privileged component will fchown the socket to the origin app, think the INTERNET permission will be enforced as expected.
I am not familiar with iOS internals, but does "very little IPC" mean "zero IPC"? Because if we are talking IPC in the context of bypassing permission checks, I imagine, 'very little' doesn't cut it?
See my comment upthread, it helps a bit, but does not close this hole since apps within the same profile can communicate through IPC, so other apps could provide network access on their behalf. I think the best example is probably Play Services, which provides functionality for a lot of apps and will communicate with Google, etc.
(Yes, you can disable network access to Play Services, but it sometimes breaks things and the general point of IPC as a hole still stands.)
You can make different profiles. They can have different unlock methods and can have different apps installed. If you have one app installed in both it's shared.
They were designed so multiple people could use one device.
Some people use them to separate identities or contain apps they view as bad. I'm not sure if the efficacy of this.
On GrapheneOS, it's like a container, or a virtual phone. Apps in different profiles (and you can install the same app in more than one profile) can't see each other and theoretically can't even tell they're running on the same phone (although I'm sure there are leaks like IP address)
It is a user thing, you can set up multiple profiles and install apps into each of them. These profiles are isolated from each other. I think they started out as a way of separating private and work apps/data, but you can have many of them. See e.g.:
And you can limit which contacts you share with nosy app like WhatsApp, and give access to only specific scope of file folders. Horrifying to think all the years every app got everything it wanted and did not have to ask and couldn't be stopped (I had a rooted phone for firewall capability for a while )
Yeah it asks on app install if you want to grant network permissions. It's just a little checkbox. You can of course manage it afterwards in app settings or permissions manager.
iOS lets you turn off data access (so outside of wifi) for apps as well, it's just not asked at install, which honestly makes sense given the demographics of iPhone users.
This resonates from the dev side. I made an offline photo search app a while back — you search your library in plain language ("a boy and a girl by the river"), CLIP embeddings all computed on device. It needs full photo access but I deliberately requested zero network permission. Was kind of proud of that.
Problem is there's no way for users to actually know that. iOS has no "this app can't reach the internet" indicator, so the whole guarantee is invisible. I even had people assume the opposite — app reads your whole library, therefore it must be uploading it somewhere. Exactly backwards.
Fantastic work. I regret I can't use it, because this is exactly what I'm looking for for quite a while, but it seems to be an impossible task (I need it on android).
The evolution of development was to make things easy and simple for the consumer. If internet was an opt-in (and it cannot be opt-out), then app function would be ostensibly limited. And the user would be given a harder time setting things up.
This is the Apple mindset. Make things easy. Do not make things complicated.
iPhones sold in China have that in settings, you can block both WLAN(Wi-Fi) and Cellular data per app. Why that turned out to be a nightmare is a different story
It's a selection bias issue. The categories you have listed are essentially web services wrapped in an app shell. Of course they need the internet. Consider these examples:
- Photo/Video editors - Snapsheed, Lightroom, Video trimmers etc.
Curiously, the Mac App Store sandbox has a com.apple.security.network.client entitlement that a developer must justify to Apple, whereas the iOS App Store does not, allowing unrestricted access to the internet.
Damn. The "iPhone last setup or erased on ..." is really nasty. What can a user really do about that? I feel like this should be fudged somehow by the OS.
Seems like in general the iPhone was not designed to avoid fingerprinting from installed apps. Only protection would be avoid installing apps and use the web browser when possible.
This. This is why everyone who wants to fingerprint and collect tons of data on end users pushes them hard on installing an app. The amount of valuable data is 10x what’s available in the browser
And it is not just the fingerprinting, it is also that a good number of people will install an ad/tracker blocker in their browser, but almost nobody knows or cares about the multiple trackers that most apps have.
To make it worse, Apple's naming undermines consciousness about this issue, since they have an option to block cross-app/site tracking (which IIRC blocks access to the advertising identifier), but called it "Allow Apps to Request to Track". A lot of people seem to hold the belief that disabling this option blocks all in-app trackers. It just blocks one way to correlate, but as this app shows, there are other ways to correlate (as well as correlating server-side using IP addresses, etc.).
On this topic, I somehow missed that Apple added a generic URL filtering API to macOS/iOS 26, which extends Safari filtering to the whole OS (well, as long as apps are using Apple's APIs). It's not perfect, but a nice addition to DNS-based blocking:
Aside from technical methods to address this, all this in-app tracking must be a violation of the GDPR, no? I can't imagine this all falls under legitimate interest.
> all this in-app tracking must be a violation of the GDPR, no?
Probably, but we're gonna have to wait for the courts to weigh in for a definitive answer.
Same with the very popular pay-or-accept-tracking model. An Austrian court found it illegal, but we'll probably have to wait for a case to make it all the way to the ECJ.
Cut your selection of apps and find/build privacy respecting alternatives for the remainder. Im trying to do this. Music is now locally hosted, Youtube is sorta kinda coming along. I've been working on reversing some of my more basic iOS apps to extract the data/endpoints they use and write my own apps. Fable really helped with this and Opus just does not cut the mustard. I hope it comes back. :/
Ah, that’s funny. Too bad those privacy nutrition labels are only honor system.
They give that one completely up to businesses, then, to devs. They also thought they should let an app maker prohibit screen recording, which might promote development since it protects revenue of e.g. subtitling apps as one example. But end result is you even end up with a black screen when recording the iPhone Mirroring app from a Mac.
Apple owes us a better balance here. iCloud Private Relay for all apps (why only Safari?! and Mail and HTTP) as a start, and plugging some of the privacy holes Loupe exposes. They don’t want us abusing free trials I suppose.
LinkedIn is the worst offender imo. I am not gonna list every shitty thing they do that goes away the moment you switch to desktop mode but the worst one is that they keep showing you the same feed for weeks if you're on mobile web.
.EU? I'd be scared to publish something like that under EU jurisdiction. I could be fined for full actual damages to Microsoft's reputation and I might even be jailed for defamation.
It used to be widely thought they were keeping it around because the most important users who actually posted the content preferred it. But they drove all those people away in 2023 by blocking apps except for their spyware one, and everything is posted by LLMs now anyway.
Again, why is this something that an app would need access? The next test under the creation timestamp value is a test for getting the UUID of the volume. Again, why is an app allowed to access the unique identifier? Apple knows this type of thing is precisely what deanonymizing people would drool over, so why is this accessible. What part of iOS would even need to know this for a legitimate purpose? Are these calls using private methods that Apple does not intend for use being abused for purpose? I'm not an iOS dev, so I have no familiarity with this.
To stop people from using apps they haven't paid for. As an honest person, if you want to use an app, you'd pay for it. Unfortunately, not everyone out there is honest, and there are various ways to get around having to pay for an app that costs money. Fingerprinting the device lets sellers of software find people who didn't pay for the software but are somehow using it.
I really hope you're being facetious. It' be pretty clever if you were, but for those that think this is serious...
If you want someone to pay for an app, don't make it free with in-app purchases. This is not something allowing for the OS to provide a unique identifier that can be abused available to app developers. App developers cannot be trusted. At. All. Ever.
```Based on a binomial/Poisson distribution and a baseline of 21 million U.S. device sales per release, a fingerprint relying on "seconds since setup" fails to uniquely identify individuals. In the high-density Early Adopter phase, you will share your exact setup second with an average of 1.01 other people (a total matching pool of ~2 people). Six months into the cycle, you will still share that second with an average of 0.68 other people.```
In the U.S., device setup time (to the second) very conservatively gets you clubbed into a single group of 100 individuals as an "advanced persistent threat" tracker. Even compressing activations to "80/20 during business hours" the math kindof maxes out at a pool of ~5 people, and assuming worst case "20x" of that still means you're still pretty darned identifiable.
If you get ~6-8 more bits of entropy (eg: Device Type + Capacity is easily 2-3 bits, and Time Zone is probably another 2-3 bits) you're cooked!
Reminds me of a meeting I was party to with the Safari team. We worked with them on some standards stuff at an old job. They claimed to have creepy-level tracking of users back then. We were discussing how to identify users for an A/B test across millions of sites and comparing what fingerprints we could both derive to most likely end up on the same user.
If you use a closed source browser. That’s the kinda shit they do.
Just using IP address, device storage, device name, and similar signals, we can identify a user. It isn’t difficult to correlate these data points. Apps like Facebook also force developers to use their SDKs for even small features.
Yeah, but IP address is "obviously" correlated with a distinct/persistent tranche of users. It's surprising that volume c_time is both more persistent as well as more unique than IP.
One correction to some comments here: an iOS app cannot list all apps that are installed. You can only check for specific apps/schemes (LSApplicationQueriesSchemes) by specifying apps you are looking to query for installation status or open. You cannot provide a large list of unrelated applications since Apple rejects that during app review.
Apple added these restrictions because installed app lists can be used for fingerprinting and privacy invasive profiling.
Yes indeed, the limit is 50 which is of course enough to fully profile "regular people" who only have a handful of apps. Also don't forget, Meta/Google/TikTok/WhateverPalantir are updated weekly which means they can tweak their LSApplicationQueriesSchemes list and cover even more apps if they want to.
Back before Apple allowed users to set the default browser I had a feature in my app that presented a list of installed browsers when a user opens an external link, giving them the option to choose where it opened.
You cannot provide a large list of unrelated applications since Apple rejects that during app review.
Thank you for the clarification!
You cannot provide a large list of unrelated applications since Apple rejects that during app review.
It does not need to be a large list though I think? You just need a small list that is very discriminative and adds enough additional entropy to uniquely identify you in combination with the other data leaked.
Allowing an app to access the pasteboard without the user explicitly pasting into the app is weird to me. Maybe the thing I have in the pasteboard is not for this app but left over from use in another app. Since there's no easy way to clear the pasteboard, this will happen often. Maybe it's because I'm not an app dev that this doesn't make sense to me????
What’s an easier way? I’m assuming they want the app to be able to detect when “a”, was copied, then “b” and then “a” again, so just looking at the value probably isn’t enough.
Why does a random app (with no special permissions given to it) get access to so much info, and why doesn't Apple tell users this (important) info? Why can't Apple make a long list of check boxes so users can dis/allow on a per-category and per-app basis?
E.g. I had no idea a random app you install (and give no permissions to) instantly has a list of every app installed on the device (e.g. can infer whether you're dating [or cheating!] from presence of tinder/bumble/hinge). That alone seems instantly monetizable by unscrupulous actors via 'is-my-partner-cheating' as a service: charge $10 to give a probable answer.
I'm in that camp of has a dating app installed but have no partner so the is-my-partner-cheating admittedly doesn't resonate with me. I've had to do some of this fingerprinting myself before for non-data-selling reasons so a lot of the system-level statistics didn't quite impress me [1], but that one was a gut-punch when I saw it pop up. It makes me wonder what apps out there have leveraged that as a signal for ads or other behavior modifications to exploit my search for a partner -- without at least having to spend a few pennies querying a data broker!
It makes sense that there's some discovery mechanism - since Google loves to use it to prefer Chrome, GMail, etc when you're in one of their apps. I wish that there were more restrictions though where you only get implicit permission to query from apps that have the same developer ID. Maybe a mutual allowlist that has to be formed, or some sort of privileged intent where you at least have to tell Apple what's going on and that gives them some contractual right to sanction you if you're using it for nefarious purposes instead.
[1] excluding the clipboard copy count, that was novel!
Loupe itself can see if you have tinder/bumble/hinge installed (verify for yourself: install tinder, then install loupe, don't give it any permissions, and it can tell if you have tinder installed or not). So the answer is: buy the data from any app your partner has installed! Or more easily, a data aggregator which will have already combined data from hundreds/thousands of apps.
So your partner only needs to have had 1 single app from the list that sells user data to a data aggregator for this to work. They do not need to have installed some special app.
Here's a random Slate article about apps getting your data and selling it to aggregators/brokers, who sell it to third-parties (you, or I, could be one of those third parties).
> How Shady Companies Guess Your Religion, Sexual Orientation, and Mental Health And sell that data to the highest bidder.
Okay it's weird but the first thing that came to mind. Logic: if I can think of a monetisable, nefarious application in 10 seconds, then it stands to reason that very many nefarious applications would be possible with more time/effort.
Not just possible, currently being implemented. People are murdered every year using this information. Last year a US politician was assassinated by someone who tracked them by buying this information from aggregator. You thought of a tame use case!
They don't, utilise the fact that every single iPhone app has access to what other apps are installed! - purchase that info from literally any iPhone app or aggregator that has it for that user. Curious how much this would cost to purhcase - a working credit card goes for $5-10 on the black market so 'apps installed on X's iphone' might be, like, 10c?
Which even halfway credible app developer would sell you that info? You know that’s illegal right? You might get some stupid indie developer to do this but no chance for anything even half big.
But if you can get actually get this data, maybe try to do this on yourself and write a blogpost about it. I highly doubt you’ll be able to.
I've never made an iOS app and don't have plans to. But my assumption is ~every >= medium-sized iOS app would be monetised by selling data to aggregators.
Even if that was the case - which it isn't - the aggregator data isn't keyed by the user in question. That is highly illegal pretty much everywhere and would get you in a lot of trouble. You can't "just" find out which apps an arbitrary person has installed on their phone. That's not how it works.
Get your hands on a random selection of 10 iPhones and look at the apps installed. I suspect you’d be horrified. As an example - any parent who has installed a free game for their kids likely has all of this info, plus more via tied in logins.
That said, I agree with the rest of your point - you’re not going to go to a developer and offer them $100 for this data on a person (and if you could, you’d still need to tell them which person, which if you could do you could just get the data yourself)
It’s crazy to me that people are being so skeptical of the idea. A lot of people share their logins freely with their spouses. I have never done it nor would I condone it, but it would be trivial for me to install spyware on the devices of many people I know, because they rightfully trust me. Not only do I know some of their device passwords¹, being “the computer guy” I could just outright ask for it or get them to input it anywhere while fixing some issue they have.
¹ And many more I have forgotten, because I make it a point to not record them, even mentally.
Holy cow, did not know ios lets apps access so many finger printable information such as apps installed, last wipe and number of copy actions.
Installed the browser as I am confident it will be good also.
Idk, I actually got the opposite impression. Most of the info is just what I would expect everyone to see: date formats, languages, various webview kind of stuff, network info. This is already more than enough for fingerprinting
> information such as apps installed
This is what surprised me too, but if you read their hint, it’s not like list API. They probe various ‘open URL in app’ to see what apps registered them, so are installed. I guess this i) won’t allow you to track apps that don’t have ‘open in app’ urls, and ii) probably hard to limit without affecting UX
> number of copy actions
This is odd, yeah, not sure why is it exposed
> last wipe
They deduce this from the volume creation date. Probably possible to hide, but also not really that important, at least to me. Fingerprinting will work with way fewer info anyway
To summarize, I think iOS is still very solid in terms of involuntary info exposure (if you trust Apple itself). Most of really sensitive info requires separate permissions. Yes, you can harden it further, but that will be more like a paranoid mode
On a tangential point, one thing that should definitely not be possible for apps these days is determining whether you enabled a VPN. AFAIK, it’s possible indirectly in iOS by enumerating network interfaces with specific/telling names.
It would be even better if app devs weren't pieces of shit making apps whose sole purpose is to gather all of this data to sell to other pieces of shits while skinning their app as a game or other app to trick users into thinking it's worth installing.
Fighting devs being able to make money in this manner is not dissimilar to getting made a drug dealers. As long as users want their product, they will sell the product.
sure, without any action from the user to increase safety, desktop OS's just allow any app to read any files.
On the other hand, desktop OS's allow a wide spread list of ways to control what applications have access too (especially Linux and BSD families).
Although, despite all this, running malware can never be safe.
Though there is a difference what store apps and non-store apps can do. I think is about store apps which are “sandboxed” and have to use public api to request then access information which non-store apps can access without.
Today I have simply given up trying not to share my personal information. What I do instead is simply blocking all ads and don’t use apps/websites that can’t be used without ad blocking. They may have many personal details like my favorite ice cream flavor but I get zero ads so I don’t care that much (I would prefer no one having this information but I’m pragmatic in such terrible society).
Unfortunately ad blocking is not effective against current cross-site and anonymous user tracking.
Fingerprinting is extensively used and can't be defeated without a decent hit to browsing experience. Mullvad and Tor browser are likely the best at anti-fingerprinting.
The only completely reliable way to avoid this tracking is by not visiting websites with fingerprinting. A tool that can help with this is LibRedirect which redirects you from sites like Twitter to privacy front ends like xcancel.
The extensive web tracking is detrimental to privacy, but it doesn't compel you to add additional PII like phone numbers, which is much worse than cross-site tracking for a surveillance capitalism threat model.
Yea, it's infuriating that most of the HN crowd thinks the apps are better then web. Apps can spy on you way more than web. It's the reason every website says "please download the app". If it was better for them to spy on you via the website they wouldn't ask you to download the app.
They are technically better. They can do more stuff and integrate with the OS better in general. That includes fingerprinting stuff and fingerprinting integration.
This is neat and interesting, truly, but the classic “what now?” emerges. I guess the only answer is “throw out my iPhone”? Otherwise this kind of seems like a circuitous ad to make people get worried and download Psylo, which I see has in-app purchases. I’m not trying to come at you here, but it’s just hard not to feel suspicious online these days.
Apple has been very good about public perception of its products and privacy. They just spent a lot of this year’s WWDC talking about the latter so I’m sure someone at Apple is aware of this.
I have not spent a lot of time thinking about why certain things like 50 apps install queries, boot volume timestamps, etc are provided to developers. But I think Apple will close these loopholes.
Also love the idea of outbound network connections being disabled by the user per app
Don't install apps outside trustable apps that don't embed tracking. Even if you cannot uninstall every app, the fewer you have, the less cross-app tracking. Also donate to and consider installing privacy-conscious alternative phone OSes. They may not have closed all holes (yet), but at least their incentives are aligned with yours.
“Just don’t use it” only gets you so far and isn’t always an option. Also, as some have mentioned in this thread, many sites now make the mobile experience so painful (or remove key features) so as to force you onto the app.
I am against cars for the most part, but I can’t just get rid of my car. In this case, I can’t get rid of Slack (and other apps) because of work and unfortunately I do not work at a company that will buy me a work phone for work things.
Ultimately this has to start at a more root level. We need to claw back privacy.
I'm not saying it's not a problem and I understand you have to use some apps. I'm just saying that currently the only way to effectively prevent apps gathering and selling this info is to never install the app in the first place.
Apps like TikTok can know which username we logged in with, even if we uninstall and reinstall the app. This is egregious, as many companies like Facebook have SDKs embedded in many apps, allowing them to accurately interconnect user activity.
Apple should be ashamed that they aren't putting effort to randomize these fingerprints....
Yes. Got my ps and ws mixed up. I was just reading about the Mt. Rushmore project (I was curious whether or not it was a WPA project -it wasn’t, officially).
I just don’t think it’s an effective way of solving the problem.
If internet access wasn't granted by default, a lot more apps would function without it.
Many other apps wouldn't exist at all, because their only reason to exist is to spy on users.
Even if it's not the most effective way to raise awareness, it does put pressure on developers to be explicit about the connectivity requirements with users. It would also be a great way to audit an app's local-first / offline-first claim without having to do a network packet capture.
Want telemetry? Send it through Apple and Google. Given Apple's late history and latest trends in Android development, I see them both favoring this approach.
Apple could refuse to publish them, then. Isn't that why we are forced to go through the App Store? Because Apple ensures every app there works in the best interest of the user?
I just flat out think this is bullshit
Non-multiplayer games, clock, camera, contacts, phone, text message, file explorer, keyboard, launcher, notes, document viewer/editor, image viewer, audio recorder...
Most of the apps on my phone do not need internet access.
That said, I'd love to have a new "Internet access" permission for apps, so users had the choice. Perhaps even separate "Allow iCloud" and "Allow Internet" but that's probably too granular for Apple's taste.
I have no idea if this is what already happens, but I feel like it might be. (Why would each app have all these network connections when the system could just manage it instead?)
It would severely depend on how you categorize "most apps" because I would say I pretty much only use apps that need the Internet, barring Calculator, Camera, and a PDF reader (only because I prefer how it zooms books vs browser. Everything else implicitly needs the Internet as that app is just a better UI to using their mobile web site, if they even offer one.
The only way to prevent malicious apps from affecting your privacy is to not install them or not give them network access.
And yes, having the ability to deny any app network access on iOS would be great.
YouTube used to be separate domains for ads and then it got merged together so that you can’t block the ads network wide without blocking YouTube videos.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/aib10i/in_china_ios_al...
If Apple wanted to provide this willingly they would. That its only available in China due to government regulation tells you all you need to know.
You could of course disable network access to Play Services, but at least for me that broke a bunch of apps or made them unreliable.
What AOSP ROMs need besides the network permission toggle is IPC scopes functionality, akin to storage scopes.
If you want something less disruptive for isolation, there's Private Space. What I like is that this can stop apps there from working in the background on stock Android as well.
Folks brings up 'IPC' as if this is some chink in the armour in AOSP. It isn't. 'Apps' pretty much on most consumer OSes can 'IPC' their way with other co-operating apps to 'achieve' network access from behind a firewall, just the same.
> since many apps communicate with Play Services and as far as I understand (but I may be mistaken) Play Services does work that involves internet access on behalf of other apps
If the OS or its privileged component will fchown the socket to the origin app, think the INTERNET permission will be enforced as expected.
I am not familiar with iOS internals, but does "very little IPC" mean "zero IPC"? Because if we are talking IPC in the context of bypassing permission checks, I imagine, 'very little' doesn't cut it?
But yes, agreed it should be everywhere.
(Yes, you can disable network access to Play Services, but it sometimes breaks things and the general point of IPC as a hole still stands.)
They were designed so multiple people could use one device.
Some people use them to separate identities or contain apps they view as bad. I'm not sure if the efficacy of this.
Grapheneos improves them significantly https://grapheneos.org/features#improved-user-profiles
https://grapheneos.org/features#improved-user-profiles
They also added the sensors permission.
Problem is there's no way for users to actually know that. iOS has no "this app can't reach the internet" indicator, so the whole guarantee is invisible. I even had people assume the opposite — app reads your whole library, therefore it must be uploading it somewhere. Exactly backwards.
This is the Apple mindset. Make things easy. Do not make things complicated.
Citation needed.
Looking through my phone the vast majority of third party apps I have installed obviously require internet access:
- Social media
- Travel (rideshare/airlines/hotels)
- Streaming
- Finance (credit cards/banks)
- Shopping
Not counting built-in apps like the calculator I'd estimate 80-90% of the apps I have installed require internet access.
- Photo/Video editors - Snapsheed, Lightroom, Video trimmers etc.
- Document readers & scanners - PDF viewers, e-readers, OCR scanners
- Note taking - Obsidian
- File/Password managers - Authenticators etc.
- Single player games - Chess, puzzles etc.
- Audio/Video players - VLC players
We've just become conditioned to accept that every app needs to phone home for tracking and ad-delivery.
To make it worse, Apple's naming undermines consciousness about this issue, since they have an option to block cross-app/site tracking (which IIRC blocks access to the advertising identifier), but called it "Allow Apps to Request to Track". A lot of people seem to hold the belief that disabling this option blocks all in-app trackers. It just blocks one way to correlate, but as this app shows, there are other ways to correlate (as well as correlating server-side using IP addresses, etc.).
On this topic, I somehow missed that Apple added a generic URL filtering API to macOS/iOS 26, which extends Safari filtering to the whole OS (well, as long as apps are using Apple's APIs). It's not perfect, but a nice addition to DNS-based blocking:
https://adguard.com/en/blog/apple-url-filter-system-wide-fil...
The author of Wipr added support to Wipr 2 as an extra in-app purchase:
https://kaylees.site/wipr2-whats-new.html#filtr
Aside from technical methods to address this, all this in-app tracking must be a violation of the GDPR, no? I can't imagine this all falls under legitimate interest.
Probably, but we're gonna have to wait for the courts to weigh in for a definitive answer.
Same with the very popular pay-or-accept-tracking model. An Austrian court found it illegal, but we'll probably have to wait for a case to make it all the way to the ECJ.
They give that one completely up to businesses, then, to devs. They also thought they should let an app maker prohibit screen recording, which might promote development since it protects revenue of e.g. subtitling apps as one example. But end result is you even end up with a black screen when recording the iPhone Mirroring app from a Mac.
Apple owes us a better balance here. iCloud Private Relay for all apps (why only Safari?! and Mail and HTTP) as a start, and plugging some of the privacy holes Loupe exposes. They don’t want us abusing free trials I suppose.
Edit: It's not a last modified timestamp, it's a volume creation timestamp: https://github.com/mysk-research/loupe/blob/2262efd4456ecba8...
If you want someone to pay for an app, don't make it free with in-app purchases. This is not something allowing for the OS to provide a unique identifier that can be abused available to app developers. App developers cannot be trusted. At. All. Ever.
In the U.S., device setup time (to the second) very conservatively gets you clubbed into a single group of 100 individuals as an "advanced persistent threat" tracker. Even compressing activations to "80/20 during business hours" the math kindof maxes out at a pool of ~5 people, and assuming worst case "20x" of that still means you're still pretty darned identifiable.
If you get ~6-8 more bits of entropy (eg: Device Type + Capacity is easily 2-3 bits, and Time Zone is probably another 2-3 bits) you're cooked!
If you use a closed source browser. That’s the kinda shit they do.
Apple added these restrictions because installed app lists can be used for fingerprinting and privacy invasive profiling.
And a data broker/aggregator can purchase such data from many (e.g. thousands) of apps and aggregate it, then sell it.
Thank you for the clarification!
You cannot provide a large list of unrelated applications since Apple rejects that during app review.
It does not need to be a large list though I think? You just need a small list that is very discriminative and adds enough additional entropy to uniquely identify you in combination with the other data leaked.
And this was heavily exploited by Facebook before Apple patched it
The "Installed Apps Probe" leak also surprised me. It is better than the current state of Android, though.
And nothing stops from using reset it every day.
Any way to reset it as an end user? (Not enough awareness of the issue for search engines to find much.)
https://odysee.com/@techlore:3/permission-not-required-the-o...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n_SpEWtqog
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=_n_SpEWtqog
https://techlore.tv/w/d7dh4P7y4dVngNoL7u7s3B
I built something similar, for the web. https://neberej.github.io/exposedbydefault/
Github: https://github.com/neberej/exposedbydefault
E.g. I had no idea a random app you install (and give no permissions to) instantly has a list of every app installed on the device (e.g. can infer whether you're dating [or cheating!] from presence of tinder/bumble/hinge). That alone seems instantly monetizable by unscrupulous actors via 'is-my-partner-cheating' as a service: charge $10 to give a probable answer.
It makes sense that there's some discovery mechanism - since Google loves to use it to prefer Chrome, GMail, etc when you're in one of their apps. I wish that there were more restrictions though where you only get implicit permission to query from apps that have the same developer ID. Maybe a mutual allowlist that has to be formed, or some sort of privileged intent where you at least have to tell Apple what's going on and that gives them some contractual right to sanction you if you're using it for nefarious purposes instead.
[1] excluding the clipboard copy count, that was novel!
So your partner only needs to have had 1 single app from the list that sells user data to a data aggregator for this to work. They do not need to have installed some special app.
Here's a random Slate article about apps getting your data and selling it to aggregators/brokers, who sell it to third-parties (you, or I, could be one of those third parties).
> How Shady Companies Guess Your Religion, Sexual Orientation, and Mental Health And sell that data to the highest bidder.
https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/data-broker-inference-p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalkerware
But if you can get actually get this data, maybe try to do this on yourself and write a blogpost about it. I highly doubt you’ll be able to.
That said, I agree with the rest of your point - you’re not going to go to a developer and offer them $100 for this data on a person (and if you could, you’d still need to tell them which person, which if you could do you could just get the data yourself)
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/09/15/34...
It’s crazy to me that people are being so skeptical of the idea. A lot of people share their logins freely with their spouses. I have never done it nor would I condone it, but it would be trivial for me to install spyware on the devices of many people I know, because they rightfully trust me. Not only do I know some of their device passwords¹, being “the computer guy” I could just outright ask for it or get them to input it anywhere while fixing some issue they have.
¹ And many more I have forgotten, because I make it a point to not record them, even mentally.
Thank you!
> information such as apps installed
This is what surprised me too, but if you read their hint, it’s not like list API. They probe various ‘open URL in app’ to see what apps registered them, so are installed. I guess this i) won’t allow you to track apps that don’t have ‘open in app’ urls, and ii) probably hard to limit without affecting UX
> number of copy actions
This is odd, yeah, not sure why is it exposed
> last wipe
They deduce this from the volume creation date. Probably possible to hide, but also not really that important, at least to me. Fingerprinting will work with way fewer info anyway
To summarize, I think iOS is still very solid in terms of involuntary info exposure (if you trust Apple itself). Most of really sensitive info requires separate permissions. Yes, you can harden it further, but that will be more like a paranoid mode
It seems a bit quixotic, but anything that goes against $_BIGCORP is tilting at windmills, anyway.
Of course, the one narrative I almost never hear, no matter who it is, is "Simply don't collect any extra data."
It's that simple. If you don't have the data, your app could be Swiss cheese, and no one can get anything dangerous.
But, in today's tech world, data is money, so every app and Web site out there, goes to any length, to hoover up as much data as possible.
I regularly get prompted to join "teams," and "leaderboards," or do "challenges," on my solitaire games.
Fighting devs being able to make money in this manner is not dissimilar to getting made a drug dealers. As long as users want their product, they will sell the product.
> Loupe also builds for macOS. The Mac version is mostly complete, but a few things still need work before it's polished.
I got that feeling just seeing the title use "native" as a synonym of "not a website".
Fingerprinting is extensively used and can't be defeated without a decent hit to browsing experience. Mullvad and Tor browser are likely the best at anti-fingerprinting.
The only completely reliable way to avoid this tracking is by not visiting websites with fingerprinting. A tool that can help with this is LibRedirect which redirects you from sites like Twitter to privacy front ends like xcancel.
The extensive web tracking is detrimental to privacy, but it doesn't compel you to add additional PII like phone numbers, which is much worse than cross-site tracking for a surveillance capitalism threat model.
More APIs, less friction selling stuff, business presence right on the homescreen.
I have a LG modern TV. Smart shit. I also use a Linux install on a NUC. HDMI.
For some godsdamned reason, the TV was able to initiate an IP bridge with the Linux NUC and get an IP address on my network.
Nobody typed it in the TV. And I'm unsure how it did so itself.
What I do know is that Mikrotik allows DHCP-server blocks of wildcard MAC addresses. Blocked the whole fucking 24 bits of their allocation.
AND if it does get back online, I also shitcanned its routing on the IP side based on hostname.
People always say, "jUsT dO nOt CoNnEcT your TV to you WiFi" which is asinine.
People say that theoretically TVs can get an internet connection through HDMI, but apparently none are actually doing so.
The only solution I suggest is physically removing WiFi cards from the guts before turning on.
What?! How on earth would this work?
I have not spent a lot of time thinking about why certain things like 50 apps install queries, boot volume timestamps, etc are provided to developers. But I think Apple will close these loopholes.
Also love the idea of outbound network connections being disabled by the user per app
iPhone
I am against cars for the most part, but I can’t just get rid of my car. In this case, I can’t get rid of Slack (and other apps) because of work and unfortunately I do not work at a company that will buy me a work phone for work things.
Ultimately this has to start at a more root level. We need to claw back privacy.
Apple should be ashamed that they aren't putting effort to randomize these fingerprints....
But very cool.