App Permissions | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Google on Thursday said it's backtracking on a  recent change  that removed the app permissions list from the Google Play Store for Android across both the mobile app and the web. "Privacy and transparency are core values in the Android community," the Android Developers team  said  in a series of tweets. "We heard your feedback that you find the app permissions section in Google Play useful, and we've decided to reinstate it. The app permissions section will be back shortly." To that end, in addition to showcasing the new Data safety section that offers users a simplified summary of an app's data collection, processing, and security practices, Google also intends to highlight all the permissions required by the app to make sense of its "ability to access specific restricted data and actions." The reinstatement comes as the internet giant moved to swap out the apps permission section with the newer Data safety labels last week ahead of the...

A newly designed privacy-sensitive architecture aims to enable developers to create smart home apps in a manner that addresses data sharing concerns and puts users in control over their personal information.  Dubbed  Peekaboo  by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the  system  "leverages an in-home hub to pre-process and minimize outgoing data in a structured and enforceable manner before sending it to external cloud servers." Peekaboo operates on the principle of data minimization, which refers to the practice of limiting data collection to only what is required to fulfill a specific purpose. To achieve this, the system requires developers to explicitly declare the relevant data collection behaviors in the form of a manifest file that's then fed into an in-home trusted hub to transmit sensitive data from smart home apps such as smart doorbells on a need-to-know basis. The hub not only functions as a mediator between raw data from IoT devices and...

Google on Friday said it's bringing an Android 11 feature that auto-resets permissions granted to apps that haven't been used in months, to devices running Android versions 6 and above. The expansion is expected to go live later this year in December 2021 and enabled on Android phones with Google Play services running Android 6.0 (API level 23) or higher, which the company said should cover "billions more devices." Google officially released Android 6.0 Marshmallow on October 5, 2015. With Android 11 that came out last year, the internet giant introduced a permission auto-reset option that helps improve user privacy by automatically resetting an app's permissions to access sensitive features like storage or camera if the app in question is left unopened for a few months. "Some apps and permissions are automatically exempted from revocation, like active Device Administrator apps used by enterprises, and permissions fixed by enterprise policy," Google...