On Android, if you install Xposed, there's XPrivacy [0], which essentially had this premise. Unfortunately, it only supports versions 4.0.3-5.1.1 (and is no longer maintained).
I haven't been following the rooting community for a while, so someone can probably correct me if there's a better alternative now, but I believe the replacement is XPrivacyLua [1].
[0] https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacy
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/xprivacylua-xposed-module-pri...
Instagram should be running in a sandbox that gets truth only if the user actually wishes to give it the truth, and if they want to demand unnecessary info from the user (e.g. access to data about other installed apps), then the app should be either lied to by the OS or banned by the platform provider.
There's an inherent conflict between the needs of the app developers and users. The device manufacturers have to take a side in that conflict, presumably the side of the user who's paying them for the device.
The problem with it is that at least one of the big the platform providers is in a conflict of interest, given how they engage in the exact same practices as a business model. Google cannot hit at anyone for any practice they also use without shooting themselves in the foot. So the status quo is maintained with everyone being allowed to take a swing at vacuuming as much personal user data as humanly possible without ever informing the user or getting proper (informed) consent.
So I'm curious how privacy-focused mods figure out which features users most want without being able to track users. It seems like a huge risk to remove a feature that could be your killer feature but you just don't know.
There must be a middle ground though. It can't be necessary for me to share my location data with an app for analytics, nor should it be necessary for me to provide a timestamped personally identifiavle breadcrumb trail, just so a site can know how i navigated.
History is littered with beautiful products that only like five people actually wanted. I love the Chevy Volt, it fits my use case perfectly and is everything I would ask for in a hybrid right now, but it's sales numbers were objectively crap. It was basically a Chevy Cruze, but sold something like 1/20th the number of units over the same time period; I'm not surprised it was discontinued.
Analytics-driven design leads to unexciting products that are useful enough to most people, with only occasional forays outside the mean when a subteam manages to launch an "unnecessary" feature with neutral metrics (until another subteam discovered the feature can be turned down with neutral metrics). It's not surprising companies love that style of development.
The only question they're answering is "how do we maximize our profit?". If that happens to mean adding features users want that's just a nice side effect.
I work on a live service, and we use analytics to determine the impact of a crash. If someonr crsshes, often they go straight to reddit and conplain If you took everything at face value online, you would never correctly assess the impact of an issue, and you'd spend all your time fixing rounding errors of issues rather than improving the experience for a large number of people. If you ask people, they'll tell you it's the worst issue, even if it's never happened to them.
This takes place in every industry except for software development.
Manufacturers are incentivized to install bloatware and, in some cases, outright malware.
Fixing this requires legal action.
In case of google (android), it's the manufacturer (of the OS) earning money on this
But as soon as it’s implemented, snoopy apps will just raise the bar further (sms verification, face verification, ‘add this contact to your phone book’, etc)
It's trivial to detect virtualized environments , not only that, the samples can afford to be patient and meticulous,and test themselves against existing analysis methods before deployment. That's why real hardware is the best place to study malware.
Your disadvantage here is that fingerprinting is a game of accuracy, where the adversary gains accuracy at basically a logarithmic(or geometric?) scale for every additional data point they have about your device, sometimes they only need one data point,such as a shared file system,let me explain: most apps need storage access right? Like you want them to read existing files or write files to be accesses by other apps. App1 writes a file with a random name or random content, app2 through appN in their affiliate network check that location/file for the random value to track your device. The apps in this network all collect various data points about you, let's say one app gets your real name and address (payment and shipping),now all the apps know those two things about you. Now they all know your zipcode and can infer things about you based on that,your last name,etc...and even do background check like lookups to know your past addresses aquaintances, cars you've driven,court cases and so much more. Now let's say one of these apps needs to send you text before it can function(most popular apps these days) , now all of them know your phone,can get a ton of info about you,who else has you as contacts and they can infer even more about if at least one of the people they track has your number as contact and they basically opened up their lives to all apps.
You can add all the layers of abstraction you want. Apps need to talk to each other and external sites/services need to reach you at a predictabl address (including physical address and such). And even if what you said was effective, it's incredibly hard to achieve without the user being very cooperative towards their own privacy preservation, and evem then ,like I said above, if anyone you have as contact reaches you using a predictable address, a lot can be constructed about solely based on their choices.
My solution is legal. Make it a crime and start throwing people in prison. If someone violates your consent to stalk you or creates public opportunities of business or employment where consenting to stalking is a requirement, make it a felony. And make privacy a core right for peoples of any society that calls itself free.
Unlike with malware authors, we can easily find the execs behind stalkerware and we can make them take responsibility (assuming people want liberty and democracy more than political theatrics).
Facebook Messenger actually has a nasty dark pattern where they will display a fake pixel-perfect copy of a permission prompt where the only way to get through is to tap Allow, and when you do they call the real prompt (since it's pixel-perfect you can't tell the difference besides the short animation when it appears) and hope you also click Allow on the real one. If this is allowed then it's a lost cause.
Apple is doing fuck all about privacy on the App Store.
Edit: nope.