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Comment by ctz | Hacker News Reader

The same goes for android.permission.INTERNET. Apps can open arbitrary URLs in the browser (which load without user intervention).

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However that's not the only use case for android.permission.INTERNET - you need it for anything that does networking on the internet, such as API calls to your web application.

So the entire computer world had run like this for decade. why are people complaining about that now? Because Apple is doing strict verification of your code behaviour?

Yesterday adobe pdf viewer tell me that an update was available both on my mac and pc! So without asking my permission, this computer application (and many others) are querying the web...

The PCs didn't sit in your pocket all data with sensing GPS location, mic, camera, footsteps, discovery of bluetooth and wifi devices around you; neither were they single point of communication with the rest of the world.

Not as long as you have not synchronized your phone with a cloud service (ICloud, Google drive, etc.) on which your PC/MAC is connect too.

>So without asking my permission //

You give your permission when you install it with auto-update enabled. I always disable auto-update.

Yes, but this relies on the program being friendly enough to give you a choice. The OS is not blocking it, it voluntarily refrains. Some are not so polite. For instance, Google Chrome auto-updates without asking permission, and the only way to stop it on Windows is to edit some registry setting. It will update even when it is not running, which annoys me since I have Chrome installed and don't use it, and every so often my computer slows to a crawl, I open Task Manager, and see "aha, chrome decided to update". It doesn't even give me the courtesy of displaying a notice, so I don't have to waste 5 minutes of acting like a detective with task manager.

If you disable the google updater service, it stops chrome from intrusively background updating. Be careful though, as it often gets reenabled when you open chrome.

AFAIR Adobe Viewer does give that option, generally I'm sure you're right.

Yes, they are one of the polite ones. Honestly very few are as obnoxious as Chrome.

People have been complaining about it for ages. Firewalls for outgoing connections are ancient technology. Like a lot of things that people rely on, the functionality is gradually moving into the OS proper.

A lot of people get upset at PC programs that do things like query for updates without permission.

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