Most of that data is still available, just gated behind permissions that require explicit consent from user now.

Does the permission model even work at this point? The vast majority of users just accept whatever the app asks for without a second thought. The rest is bullied by platform monopolies.

There is very little real choice for users.

There may be few real alternatives. But this is a choice: You're getting the information, you're making a choice to use all features, use limited features, or just drop the app.

And you have explicit control and granular control, even if 99% of the people won't ever use it. Before, if you didn't want Facebook accessing your Microphone, the only option was to not use the app at all. Now, I can specifically disable that option.

Facebook may just make the app not run unless you give it mic permission. Of course you don't have to run it. I have seen apps that explicitly refuse to run unless you give them the permissions they want on iOS even though they shouldn't need them for 99% of their functionality.

Wouldn't such a behaviour be against GDPR? Probably not because of technicalities, but then I would hope the EU to make yet another piece of legislation to address this.

That's where Google/Apple should step in and ban those apps from the store.

Of course it works, why wouldn't it? If you want a crippled device that never lets anything access to data, you can always buy a dumbphone.

I hope that the permissions are better to understand and control than the current ones. Right now they seem to be designed to give the appearance of giving users control but the implementation is pretty bad and user unfriendly.

And the other problem is you install an app all the time and the permissions aren't clearly laid out. I want:

1. tell me I install an app that wants "some list of permissions".

2. let me disable this permission for all apps installed now and in the future.

1) it is not really realistic in practice:

- Permissions are requested incrementally at runtime. For large apps, a LOT of these permissions depend on corner cases BUT you still declare all the permissions you might ask for.

So maybe I will declare that I might ask to see the content of your screen .. because there is an help menu where I take a video of your screen to send to support after asking you for the permission.

Same for camera .. we might use Google Pay for most cases, but in one of the countries where we have the app, a local player has a very popular solution that scans your credit card. So we declare that we might need Camera because of this sdk.

Etc.

This is one of the reasons why the previous model where you asked the permissions at install time did not work very well in practice.

Anything targeting API level 23 has all permissions denied by default (and targeting higher level is mandatory for all new apps right now).

I would also like to give permissions only for a limited time and see a log how the permissions are being used in detail.

They don't limit the power of the computer, only who can access that power. It's not hard to grant an app full access if you trust it - but the "trusted by default" model is hopelessly outdated now that the vast majority of software is sourced from anonymous internet 3rd parties rather than a few well known software vendors.