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by plainOldText 4389 days ago
I was close to install it, then I read their ZLauncher Privacy Policy and I discovered they read your text messages and call logs, and I abandoned it. I guess, trust really affects our perception of a system, and our willingness to share personal information with it. Unfortunately, if there is no trust, the relationship/interaction man-machine will never achieve its full potential.
5 comments

....literally, what? It's like complaining that the contacts app has permissions to read your contacts. It's a launcher man, of course it needs to read your call logs and messages, what's so upsetting about this?
They not only access that information (locally, on-device), but may send it:

> When you use the Service, this information may be sent to Nokia for the purpose of improving the Service. You can choose the level at which you participate in the development of Nokia’s products and services. You may disable the collection of information by changing the settings of the Service.

https://www.zlauncher.com/privsupp.html

I see there's an option user can disable this behavior, but who knows whenever it'll transfer this data right on startup before you have the chance to opt out?

How did you think that it would suggest you who to call or notify you of incoming messages?
By not having INTERNET permission, so users can be somehow assured their data's more likely to stay with them. Why the launcher would need one?

Android really needs a sane custom permission system and some content provider protocol standardization (like "this app provides weather data" and "this app may access any providers that provide store prices") and a package manager that support dependencies on them (similarly, "this app needs a news headlines provider").

Really? Because the stall for me was that "sign in with Google+" demands permission to read my email address book.

"Fuck" and "you" are the only things that come to mind there.

The demanded google OAuth scopes are:

data-scope="https://www.googleapis.com/auth/plus.profile.emails.read"

as seen in the page source code. Not your address book.

Machine learning is sort of hard to do without corpus.
I bet money, it's simply most frequent app and contact called.
As if no other organizations are reading them.
As if sharing with one organization means you want to share with all of them.