Why can't some Android software be opened without obtaining some permissions?

For some Android APPs, obtaining relevant permissions is a necessary operation. For example, if WeChat wants to use the "voice" function, it must be given microphone permissions, and if Alipay wants to use "scan" to pay, it must be given camera permissions. Under normal circumstances, most APPs will require permissions such as camera, microphone, read and write storage space, and positioning. If these common permissions are not granted, the APP may not work properly. However, not all permissions are necessary. For example, "Contact List" and "SMS" are relatively private permissions and even involve user security. But most apps will still ask to read the phone’s contact list or text messages. Some apps have legitimate reasons. For example, if WeChat does not read the contact list, it cannot use the address book to add friends. If some schedule management software cannot read user text messages, they will not be able to use the schedule reminder function. In fact, the permission management of the Android system is now very complete, and the permissions required by the application software can be seen in the system settings. Users can also disable sensitive permissions of an application based on actual needs.

For some Android applications that cannot be opened normally without obtaining sensitive permissions, users need to weigh the pros and cons themselves. For example, some applications clearly do not have social functions, but they require permission to read contacts. If you do not give it this permission, you cannot open the application. This is obviously unreasonable. For this kind of application that strangely requires privacy permissions, my personal suggestion is not to use it. Nowadays, there are many Android software on the Internet to obtain users’ personal information under the banner of “free”. Although these applications may indeed provide some free benefits, their ultimate purpose is to obtain users’ mobile phone numbers and even read them. Get the contact list and text message content. You must know that a normal user may have hundreds of contact information of relatives and friends saved on his mobile phone. Once these contact information are leaked, various advertising and sales calls, and even scam calls will follow.

Some netizens may have this experience: They obviously pay great attention to the privacy and security of their mobile phones and will never disclose their numbers easily. Application software is downloaded from the regular application market, and these software are also prohibited from reading the phone's data. telephone number. But even so, you will still receive various spam text messages and sales and scam calls from time to time. This is because the mobile phones of your relatives and friends may have installed applications that read contact lists, resulting in your mobile phone number being leaked to a third party.

Now is the so-called "big data era". While various free applications provide a lot of convenience, they also ask for what they want from users. Contact information is the most basic. A sort of. It is also common to collect users’ web browsing records and even chat records to push precise advertising information to users. For ordinary users, this kind of data collection is basically impossible to prevent. All we can do is to be more vigilant and avoid further losses caused by the leakage of privacy.