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Comment by compiler-guy | Hacker News Reader

Dozens of innocuous-seeming apps collect private data. I wish the world wasn't filled with bad actors, but it is. So having a basic privacy policy even for this is annoying, but the answer to "It's a screen saver, why in the world do I need this?" is "because bad actors do bad stuff so everyone suffers."

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I wonder if this couldn't be solved at the OS level. Maybe there could be some kind of a flag that, if the OS sees it, the app is not allowed to store/save/communicate/whatever. Then, any app that has this flag doesn't need a privacy policy because it is OS restricted from doing anything that might require such a policy?

I suggest this as someone who has no experience whatsoever in making apps or mobile operating systems (beyond being a user of one), so I don't know how practical it is.

Android has a permission for internet access. It's still there, but enabled for everybody by default. This was an intentional decision on the part of Google.

Back in the day, you could install Android apps that explicitly did not use the internet permission. You could make your installation decisions based on whether apps requested that permission and whether it made sense for them to do so. Some AOSP mods even let you disable that permission for apps (though YMMV as to how well that actually worked in practice).

It's probably an absolute minority of apps which doesn't do any network stuff at all. And even if they don't reach for the network themselves they might have a link to open a support website, prefilling some data based on the device/user, in the default browser.

> Dozens of innocuous-seeming apps collect private data

Like Google Play, Google Chrome, Google Photos, Google Phone, Google Contacts and so on and so forth.

This is a very perverse thing from Google.

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