Re:Any Android app can read your WhatsApp database
by matt_heimer on Tuesday March 11, 2014 @01:22PM
(#7380711)
Google did, almost everybody on HN whined like a baby. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7255579
Re:Any Android app can read your WhatsApp database
by kllrnohj on Tuesday March 11, 2014 @01:28PM
(#7380745)
> the insecure /sdcard partition is the place where most of the storage is in nearly all Android phones.
/sdcard and /data are on the same partition these days, you should just be using the app's private folder if the data is sensitive in the slightest. Which in this case it clearly is, and it's not even large data.
Re:Any Android app can read your WhatsApp database
by eropple on Tuesday March 11, 2014 @08:26PM
(#7383168)
This is true on Nexus phones, but it's a mount point (not "emulated") on Samsung or other SD-card-equipped phones, which I think--not sure--is more of a majority.
Re:Any Android app can read your WhatsApp database
by kllrnohj on Wednesday March 12, 2014 @02:26PM
(#7387328)
No, on Samsung & other SD-card-equipped phones /sdcard points to internal storage and there's some other path, like /sdcard2, that points at the actual SD card.
Re:Any Android app can read your WhatsApp database
by izacus on Tuesday March 11, 2014 @12:54PM
(#7380511)
Yeah I agree - increasing the size of internal storage was a blessing for my/our apps in terms of security (no more storing of secure data on shared storage due to lack of space).
Google should probabl MTP from the start and just formatted SD cards with one of the ACL supporting filesystems to get security right. But as the saying goes... it's easy to be a general after battle :)
Still, I think Google is taking the wrong approach: the insecure /sdcard partition is the place where most of the storage is in nearly all Android phones. If your app needs to store larger amounts of data, that is the place to do it. Now, there are methods to use that storage a lot more securely than this, but the way Android works really leaves developers no other option than storing this stuff on the SD card.
Google should lock down access to the SD card even more, but they'll probably cause an uproar and break many apps.