Ars has an article about some applications sending GPS data to advertisers without the user’s knowledge. The article identifies the problem using a game as an example.
The Android operating system has an access control mechanism that limits the availability of key platform features and private user information. Third-party applications that rely on sensitive features have to request permission during the installation process. The user has the option of canceling the installation if they do not wish to give the application access to the specific features that it requests. If a user starts to install a simple arcade-style game and finds out that it wants access to the user’s GPS coordinates, for example, the seemingly suspicious permission request might compel the user to refrain from completing the installation process.
It’s a practical security measure, but one critical limitation is that there is no way for the user to discern how and when the application will use a requested feature or where it will send the information. To build on our previous example, the user might decide to grant an Android game access to their GPS coordinates so that the software can facilitate multiplayer matches with nearby users. The user has no way of knowing, however, whether the application is also transmitting that information to advertisers or using it for malicious purposes. Making the permission system more granular might potentially address those kinds of problems, but would also have the undesired affect of making it too complex for some users to understand. Indeed, there are already a lot of careless users who simply don’t take the time to look at the permission listing or don’t understand the implications.
I would expect one of the next incarnations of the ‘droid OS will have some adjustments to this. Like the article identifies though, it’s difficult to give people more information about something like this…most just don’t understand how these things work. When we were able to install things on the blackberries I put a few applications on that wanted to query GPS data. I always told them no, and left the GPS turned off. It seems like the blackberry is a little more secure and designed for the business environment, so the controls are a little more granular.
