Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> You don't need the OS providing anything to use arbitrarily modified APKs. We also don't want to give apps a legitimate reason to ban GrapheneOS as opposed to being able to convince the tiny number of apps enforcing Google certification to allow it.

I think you said the truth out loud, a rom which tries too much to fight for your privacy would just be banned. (And I do agree with that)

 help



Protecting strong privacy conflicts with the kind of hooking features unable to actually protect privacy without being easily bypassed. The reason apps would ban doing that is due to compromising the privacy and security model for applications, not protecting user privacy.

Nearly the only thing which would potentially result in the OS being banned which is a legitimate privacy feature would be hiding that the Mock Location feature is enabled which is pretty much pointless since apps can ban the OS as a whole instead of only banning using them when Mock Location being enabled. Our planned per-app Location Scopes feature doesn't necessarily need to say that Mock Location is enabled but it should be possible for apps to detect so they don't have an excuse to ban GrapheneOS as a whole. It's far better that they ban using Location Scopes than banning using GrapheneOS at all. We could make our own API for detecting it's enabled so that apps detecting Mock Location work but apps aware of GrapheneOS can choose to ban Location Scopes rather than banning GrapheneOS. We aren't going to do something which simply hurts users should reducing the apps they can use for no actual benefit.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: