How do I know whether to say "Allow" or "Disallow" when it gives me no idea what either option actually means in concrete?
Then it started prompting users before allowing them to paste, and then the claims of privacy violations began to come in.
If instead I were able to specify what was happening in the prompt rather than iOS giving users an ambiguous statement, or even provide a detection pattern, it wouldn't have been nearly as bad.
I feel like this really harms security and privacy awareness by flooding the field with unimportant prompts/warnings to the degree that a real issue is similarly ignored because it is assumed to just be noise.
The fact that there are so many popups should mean apps are reaching for access to your system way beyond what they should be. It shouldn't mean Apple needs to get rid of the pop-ups.
Yes, I don't know why the OS isn't tracking the pop-up by bundle id or anything. It's not like I changed my mind the last dozen times…
No. They’re correct, there.
The app developer should not get to provide the message text for a prompt like that.
A secondary note somewhere in less than ten words, maybe, where it explicitly warns that the statement may be false.
In App Store apps, where these messages get human review, it could more safely be allowed.
Shady developers would try very hard to get past such checks, for example by changing that message based on the date, IP address range, nearby WiFi networks, receipt of a payload, etc.
They could introduce an optional string-valued entitlement and check its text. That would be a lot easier but still require them to translate messages.
LLM should still be able to catch a misleading permission message though.
I don't really even care what OP's good intentions are, because the minute the app is sold, those good intentions are out the window. I use very few apps because I assume they are always going to potentially be adversarial to my interests.
The system warning is correct and should not be subject to the developer promising free candy to gullible users.
I suspect that was to get around reviewers, and it seems to have worked.
I reported and nuked the app. I have no idea if Apple ever did anything about it.
The baddies are pretty clever.
before that, facebook was stealing everything on your clipboard and send back to their server.
This dialog is what it take to stop them.
and it have the pattern detect you asked.
But that would require the OS to know what a relevant URL is, so the permission must be scoped to a prefix, or maybe a regex(1) to be applied when the clipboard contains text content.
(1) restricted to "proper" regular expressions that don't have the security issues of Perl-style REs.
Maybe the dialogs api should be treated like autoplaying videos with sound on the web, just disable the api if it is called outside of a click event handler, and let the consumer app break. That would be a breaking change for OSs tho. It wouldn’t prevent malicious UI patterns from triggering annoying permission prompts, but it would minimize accidental bad ux eg calling it in the main method on load
Which reminds me. Why does the CVS app need access to Bluetooth?
If you have an Extracare card, in some markets, you can self-unlock the locked display cabinets with the CVS app (because they have your identity via the ExtraCare card which adds inherent trust).
It's powered by the Invue smartlock platform. https://invue.com/smart-locks
https://abc7ny.com/post/cvs-testing-new-nyc-shoppers-open-ca...
Yes! This is part of the Flockification of everything.
https://indyme.com/solutions/freedom-case
The CV footage just adds that extra comfortable feeling, doesn't it?
https://indyme.com/hubfs/E6A61CF7-E252-4994-91E1-0FC0E88781F...
It's "freedom" for "honest shoppers"!
Same reason Walmart gated the self-checkout Scan-and-Go-via-phone system behind a paid membership on Walmart+, criminal's not gonna burn fifty bucks to steal a couple times if they have to hand over anything vaguely close to PII, even if it's burner PII.
Then you have to require these permission controls to tell the app the user denied permission, and not just giving a valid but empty result. Some people on HN feel strongly that when you deny contacts permission to an app, the app should receive a list of dummy contacts. Without it a bad app can lock its UI and not do anything unless the permission is granted.
If an app says "I'd like local network access to find other copies of myself", and you say yes - you're not giving it permission to find other copies of itself. You're giving it all local network access.
If you give it 'full disk access' because it wanted to access one file, and 'local network access' because it wanted to scan for copies of itself - you've given it full permission to export all of your data to your LGTV.
People sit at office jobs all day on a computer, and still don't get what a file is. And when they run into minor issues, they just throw up their hands and say "well I'm bad at computers." You literally work on one all day long, how is this excuse still possible in 2026?
I'm not expecting everybody to become IT experts or anything. But you should know what a file is. Understand what a network is and that 2 computers on the same network can talk to eachother, understand that a TV is just a computer that plays video files. I get why older people might struggle a bit more with these simplified interfaces, but people who grow up with them, who are given a goddamn iPad at 5 years old, they should have some basic idea by now.
Doesn't anybody remember MySpace? Everybody who had a page suddenly learned HTML and CSS. And the only benefit was having a cool MySpace Page? It just shows me that people are capable when given the tools. All we do is take away those tools "because complicated" and we treat people like dumbasses. People are smart and will figure shit out. These dialogs and things like them make computers harder to use for people who understand them, and don't educate the people who need to learn.