[kelnos]

Frankly I think that level of privacy control has little appeal to the mainstream. You could of course argue that modded Android ROMs also have little appeal to the mainstream, and so adding non-mainstream features to modded ROMs is cool. (And I'd totally agree with you.)

But I suspect that Kondik might aspire to get privacy features like this into AOSP. Something like an all-or-nothing incognito mode has precedent in places like Chrome and Firefox, so I feel like something like this would have a reasonable chance of making it in. A fine-grained permissions system likely wouldn't.

However, I personally would like a little more fine-grained control. I might trust a location-centric app with my GPS (or at least recognize that the app is useless without it), but not want to give it access to my contacts.

Note that CM7 did have a fine-grained permissions system. It wasn't as extensive as OpenPDroid, but you could flat-out reject individual permissions given to apps on CM7. Unfortunately it often caused crashes, as the apps weren't built to be denied so harshly. The fake-/no-data approach of incognito (also one of the options that OpenPDroid offers) probably won't cause any compat headaches.

[ac]

Thanks for an insightful reply.

> Frankly I think that level of privacy control has little appeal to the mainstream.

One might argue that the whole idea of privacy is of little appeal to the mainstream.

> The fake-/no-data approach of incognito (also one of the options that OpenPDroid offers) probably won't cause any compat headaches.

The idea of OpenPDroid is to provide fine-grained permissions together with the fake-data/no-data approach to enforcing them, which prevents apps from crashing when access is denied. And that also enables using the apps even when they might have potential violations of your own privacy policy.

[yareally]

> Frankly I think that level of privacy control has little appeal to the mainstream

Those that unlock their bootloader, root their device/flash third party firmware are not mainstream users though. However, many of them do share the same sort of apathy to privacy as mainstream users from my observations. Although there are some reputable third party ROM projects for Android, it's quite amazing how so many are willing to blindly flash nearly anything posted on a forum with little regard to what it might do to their device.

Regarding OpenPDroid, anyone can submit any sort of additions to Cyanogenmod that they wish and are then reviewed on their gerrit[1]. First step to getting something like OpenPDroid in Cyanogen is for someone to integrate it without messing up the source tree and submitting it for review. They might deny it still, but one won't know until trying.

[1] http://review.cyanogenmod.org/