Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Supervising Smartphone Sensor Sucking Software?

Sensors

The amazing sensors in our phones track where we are, what we’re doing, what we see and hear, even our stress levels and pulse rate.

flir-one-smartphone-2  

And the cool software we run in our phones helps us navigate, avoid traffic, communicate with our family, friends, and business associates, stay informed, and be entertained.  Sound, video, vibration, interaction, immersion, augmented reality….  It’s awesome.

Privacy is Dead

But the price we pay for this connected life is a complete loss of any modicum of privacy to institutions, companies, individuals, and artificial intelligences to whom we would not choose to surrender such intimate and private information.

 

Take Control with XPrivacy!

 

When it entered the phone wars, the evil search giant (ESG) used the idealistic and altruistic Open Source movement to mobilize the “crowd” of idealistic, motivated individuals who want to collaborate on developing systems together, where the information and intellectual property is shared freely.  The ESG created AOSP the Android Open Source Project, which they later treacherously abandoned to earn more money in the Phone Wars.

 

But the AOSP lives on!  And noble, rebel coders still produce cool software.  Here is a great example.  This application enables you (the phone owner) to decide which information the applications installed in your phone are allowed to see and use.  It feeds the applications fake or no data from sensors if you don’t want them to know where you are, who is in your contact list, with whom you speak on the phone, etc.  You decide which sensor and private data of yours the application is allowed to have.  Of course it’s free.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bokhorst.xprivacy.installer

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