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by Sidnicious 4141 days ago
Popular apps can essentially request any permission and you'll still download it — are you really going to forgo having Facebook on your phone because it asks for a couple of slightly-objectionable permissions?

On iOS, the average user has a chance to download that mainstream app and deny it access to their contacts.

3 comments

> are you really going to forgo having Facebook on your phone because it asks for a couple of slightly-objectionable permissions?

That sounds like you meant it as a rhetorical question, but "yes" is a reasonable answer.

I've no idea why you have been downvoted. I also do not have apps on my phone which ask for permissions I do not like.
It sounds to me like the question was supposed to read

> are [most people] really going to forgo having Facebook [...]

There will certainly always be people who do pay attention to permissions for privacy or security reasons, but they seem* vastly outnumbered by the people who don't.

* Just an intuitive sense, I have not looked for data to back this up.

The point is valid, but it still doesn't address the 'general population' problem - how do you get the users to care about their security/privacy? Giving fine-grain control over permissions is a fantastic idea.. but then you realize that the 'general population' that you made this for will never touch those settings, so it's no different than telling users what permissions an application will take.

Also, the development cost of 'does this feature exist?' for each permission is pretty high.

I did, I use a third-party facebook client. It's cumbersome :(
Yes, I did forgo the Facebook app. For a host of reasons though, permissions being only one of them.

Then Facebook Lite came out, and it was what I wanted all along.