Feature Request: More privacy [not a question]

asked 2015-09-16 23:15:20 +0300

Anonymouse
646 ●9 ●14 ●19

Dear Jolla-Team,

Thank you for respecting our privacy. I know you work hard and give your best. But may I point you in a direction you gave yourself, when promoting SailfishOS?

You wanted to protect the privacy of your user. And from what I understood, you also wanted to help us protect our data and valuable personal information. Well, from what I see, iOS is enormously advanced and protecting users hell of a lot. Maybe you could do the same for us by implementing the following:

More privacy by:

• NO app gets access to the smartphones telephone number, carrier, IMEI, MEID, IMSI, MAC-address or other unique identifiers unless explicitly allowed by the user
• unique identifiers like the MAC-address change if not connected and only polling for surrounding access points
• NO app gets access to contactes, calendar events, photos or any other private data unless explicitly allowed by the user
• my location can not be tracked by cell ID, Wifi-SSIDs or any other location aware method unless explicitly allowed by the user
• Apps can not see more information than they need to. Example: There is an app to sync data over the internet. This app does not need to know the name of the access point (Wifi SSID), any surrounding access point, nor the name of my carrier, nor my location or the devices uptime (a very common case for Android apps)
• access to the host list, black and white list are controlled by an app or setting, not by SSH to the device and nano or other terminal editor
• any method of trying to track your device down (unique identifier, installed apps, URI schemes, cookies, and whatsoever) is blocked and has a setting to disable on a per app basis.
• every app runs in a sandbox and can not look outside of it, unless needed or allowed
• Permissions for apps can be revoked any time for any app, no matter if its a native or an Android app.
• All settings and features a transparent, every user can see and enable it and has not to ask in a forum or try it out by himself, because there is not documentation.
• A way to encrypt the whole device
• support for native PGP apps (not K9-mail and APG) and preinstalled apps for secure communication
• VPN support
• TOR support

I know its possible, because Apple does most of those things with their OS. This may be a long way but I honestly can not see anything getting even close to this. And yes, I would wish to be able to use Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Google, etc... but I understand it is not yet feasible. But hey, before anybody wants to set me right: It is not the apps, which are evil. It is not the service which is evil per se - it is the OS on which those apps are running, that do not protect the user. Like I said: iOS is showing the way.

Thanks for reading.

PS: I love Android. I do not specifically like iOS, but after I written a lot of stories around security and mobile OS, I have to tip my hat to Apple, who are really trying hard to give the users some privacy - and I wish jolla will do the same for us.