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Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones
(www.the-independent.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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To be fair, the Android permission system is crap. I have an app to automate certain things. It requests only the exact permissions required for the actions I have configured. All I want to do is enable auto-rotate if a certain app is in the foreground and set portrait mode otherwise. In order to do that, the app needs full screen reader access and can theoretically see everything that's on the screen. That said, I personally don't believe the Messenger app was well intentioned. But if it were, it may not have a choice but to request these permissisions for legitimate use cases.