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Comment by discostrings | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't agree more--OpenPDroid is great, and I would suggest anyone who values privacy and who is technically inclined give it a try.

Unfortunately, we won't be seeing it baked into CyanogenMod. CyanogenMod used to have a feature to disable specific permissions back in the CM7 days. As I understand it, Google insinuated that CyanogenMod would likely be banned from the Android Market if that feature continued; it wasn't ported to CM9. That's why I imagine this new incognito feature isn't configurable and can only be turned fully on or fully off.

Still, this is a step in the right direction. There's a lot of room to stand up to Google about data privacy right now, and I'm glad to see a big player doing it.

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This is untrue. Aokp still has a permissions blocking app available with their ROM and I don't know exactly what google would be blocking as far as I know CM doesn't distribute apps on the google market. The issue is it was outright blocking vs seeding so many apps would break/fc.

AOKP is not CyanogenMod. And Google would block CM devices from being able to access the Play market.

so please explain why cm would differ from aokp and why google would even make this distinction. They are both the two most popular roms at this time, that support the most devices. With Paranoid Android very close. Saying that Google would block play market access to CM for doing something another incredibly popular rom is doing is ridiculous.

Here's some backup from ciwrl, a CM dev, from March 2012 [1]:

"I can answer the second part, regarding CM inclusion of such a function. And the answer is a resounding "no". Originally, the functionality for CM mirrored that of PDroid, including 'spoofing' the data calls. It was decided that our footprint in the Android ecosystem was too large to ship such functionality out of the box. A million active users of our own, plus the many derivatives that use our source, would essentially cause a million+ polluted data and statistics for app developers.

Not only was this deemed unacceptable, we received feedback from 'the powers that be' that should such functionality be issued directly, CM could very well be cutoff from all Android Market applications, which again, would ripple to most Custom ROMs.

So, we chose to neuter the functionality."

[1] http://forum.cyanogenmod.com/topic/44589-combining-cyanogen-...

Regarding the original comment of permissions blocking vs seeding fake data(pdroid) are two different issues. Thats why the new incognito mode is not facing a similar backlash.

I'm running CM10 on my phone but I'm not sure where the most recent OpenPDroid installation is or whether it's phone dependent or not...

Mind enlightening me a bit? Thanks!

Well, I'm exploring the process myself. From what I understand, you need to patch the CM source tree for your device with the patches found at [1] (choose the branch that corresponds to the correct Android version; CM 10 is AOSP 4.1.2, CM 10.1 is AOSP 4.2). Then build the source tree and install on your phone, similarly to how you did with the unmodified CM10 firmware. If anyone has more experience with getting OpenPDroid to work with CM, please, correct me if I'm wrong.

[1] https://github.com/OpenPDroid/PdroidBuildPatches/tree/4.2.0

From what I understand, you have to install it into the ROM and reflash, and then install an app that will manage permissions. Installing it into the ROM is the hard part, but I've heard that there are tools to do it.

There's an auto-patcher utility[1] they've developed--you basically give it your ROM file and specify the patch, and it'll generate an update file you can flash to enable it (as well another file you can flash to remove it).

There's also a utility mentioned on that page that provides a GUI for Windows that will automatically download patches and run the auto-patcher[2].

It's definitely not easy yet, but it's not too difficult to get through if you're used to this sort of thing.

[1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1719408

[2] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=31648393

Thank you for replying (and thanks to the others too but this was more helpful). That certainly sounds within my pea-brain's ability to follow directions.

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