Earlier this year, Apple announced major changes to its mobile operating system that would give it a closer look and feel to an Android device. Google now finds itself going in the opposite direction, meeting Apple somewhere near the middle with the addition of privacy-focused restrictions.
Android 11, the operating system belonging to phones of the Green Bubble Clan, will be receiving an update that will force apps to use the phone’s built-in camera app. Yes, that’s the case even if users have already set a third-party app as the default camera option.
Understandably, Android users may not be happy about the changes being made to an operating system that is often celebrated for encouraging personalization.
iPhone users, meanwhile, may be too busy surfing the web on Safari or sending emails via Apple Mail to realize anything is going on.
The change, Google claims, is intended to prevent bad actors from potentially accessing a user’s location.
Here’s the problem Google is trying to address:
You launch App A and it requests to access your location data.
You say no.
You upload images onto App A from your Camera App B (which isn’t the phone’s built-in camera app, but has received your blessing for location tracking).
App A quietly extracts your location data from the images taken and imported from Camera App B.
App A gets the location data you didn’t want it to have in the first place.
“[W]e believe it’s the right trade-off to protect the privacy and security of our users,” the Android engineering team wrote earlier this month.
Users will still be able to use a third-party camera app as their default photo-taking tool, maintaining all of the designed user shortcuts to access the desired camera app. Users will also still be able to take photos with the cameras built into popular social media platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok (unless, you know...).
Apps will still be able to launch the camera app of the user’s choice — Google only intends on preventing those apps from importing photos or videos from third-party photo apps. Because photos taken on mobile devices are often geotagged with coordinates of where the photo was taken, non-camera apps could potentially access those coordinates even if it never explicitly received location tracking permissions.
Concerns over these loophole tracking issues first came to light in 2019, when researchers from the International Computer Science Institute looked at more than 88,000 apps from the Google Play Store and determined that 1,325 of them found ways to circumvent the OS’ permission system.
RECENT POSTS
"Fundamentally, consumers have very few tools and cues that they can use to reasonably control their privacy and make decisions about it," said Serge Egelman, one of the researchers from the International Computer Science Institute who helped shed light on the issue (via CNET). "If app developers can just circumvent the system, then asking consumers for permission is relatively meaningless."
Shutterfly, the popular photo platform that allows users to create physical prints from their device’s digital images, is one of the more noteworthy examples. The company was found to be harvesting its users’ location data from their photos’ EXIF metadata. The company denied those documented allegations, stating that it only collects that information with the user’s permission.
While some may be quick to praise Google for taking such an aggressive approach to increasing user privacy, some — particularly those who’ve invested resources into developing third-party camera applications — don’t necessarily see this as a win.
“This unfortunately does limit third-party camera apps, and means they can’t fully replace the built-in camera app,” OpenCamera founder Mark Harman told The Verge.
“It seems a shame in my opinion to take away people’s choice here.”
Earlier this year, Apple announced several major changes coming to its latest mobile OS for enhanced user privacy and security. iPhone users can expect to see the following updates:
App privacy disclosure
Tracking permissions
Clipboard use alerts
Approximate location
Camera and microphone alerts
We go into greater detail about these changes here.
So, Android users, where do you stand? Are you OK with Google stripping away some of the personalization features attached to your device? Sound off in the comments below.