Nobody reads source code (hell they don’t even read the permissions and those are a lot easier to understand); the de-spied clone couldn’t use the same name, couldn’t necessarily communicate with the same servers, and wouldn’t get near as much exposure.

The practical impact of such a change, even if it were forced top down by Google, is nil. Nobody outside a tiny minority of geeks treats free software as a selling point.

In theory you could automate the process of removing unwanted permissions in another app store. For example, if some game on the google app store wants the camera but doesn't need it, a "safe app store" could download its code and remove the camera permissions and any potential calls to functions which read from the camera. (They could be replaced with blank stubs or even a fake video like a rickroll). Same principle for address book (just provide fake/randomly generated people, etc).

Obviously not everyone would use the safe version because of the network effect of Google's play store. But for anyone who becomes aware of the "safe app store" and is aware of privacy risks, they'll almost certainly chose to download their apps from there.

Afaik, some of this is possible on a rooted android phone: it is possible, for example, to cut off an application from real GPS data, and instead feed it fake data.

You've already lost most users at "rooted" though. It also requires that someone has done the legwork to root a specific model, and it's always a moving target with new phone models which try new ways to prevent you rooting (or voiding your warranty). The majority of manufacturers are unhelpful when it comes to giving you more control over your phone.

All the more reason that things should be free software with anti-tivoization, so that the stock ROM on phones can be replaced easily. Most of android is free, but because it allows non-free parts (drivers, etc), it's a complete mess for people to tinker with devices because the method is different for every model.

You shouldn't really need root to selectively enable permissions for some apps either. The "all or nothing" approach to permissions is a poor design choice.

The source being open puts huge pressure on the developer not to put in backdoors.

Overmore, your claim

> Nobody outside a tiny minority of geeks treats free software as a selling point.

is wrong. Just to give one counterexample, the European Comission is not a bunch of geeks and they strongly prefer free software.

We're not talking about backdoors. We're talking about stuff that's exposed up front before the user can even install the program.

The EC is a statistical anomaly. One agency out of how many out there?

> The practical impact of such a change ... is nil.

I don't believe that. I think there would likely be a small group of people that would audit the software to create fact finding reports and others may create patches to fix software. Of course this is still subject to abuse, but there would probably reputations for certain sources.

Similar to journalism. There are a lot of first hand sources out there but the average layman does not read them. They would rather read a summary/interpretation of the facts. This is also subject to abuse. Reputation is important.

I don’t think end users would be the ones doing the code review. Making source auditable by “a tiny minority of geeks” would be a net positive, increasing the chance that someone (bug bounty hunter, appsec blogger, etc) would find and report on malicious apps. It would be no silver bullet, but more transparency would be no bad thing.

Reading it verbatim isn’t necessary for everyone

A “paper trail” back to the contents of our gadgets that can be audited, and some people would no doubt, would be much better than

“Fu society we own it all.”

Open source is the means of production today. Let’s keep it that way.

We’d end up tossing fewer gadgets if we required they run open-source:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15721911