Android 上不讓 App 取得真實的電話簿資料

Hacker News Daily 上看到「Fake Contacts」這個專案,可以把 Android 上的電話簿資料換成假資料,把真實的資料另外存放保存,藉此不讓 app 取得電話簿裡面的真實資料:

Create fake phone contacts, that will be stored on your phone along with your real contacts. The idea is to feed fake data to any apps or companies who are copying our private data to use or sell it. This is called "data-poisoning".

Nothing about these fake contacts will interfere with your normal use of your phone or your real contacts.

可以在 F-Droid 上下載使用:「Fake Contacts」。

另外在 Hacker News 上面也有討論:「Fake_contacts: Android app to create fake phone contacts, to do data-poisoning (github.com/billdietrich)」,其中大家馬上想到的就是 iOS 14 推出的相片保護機制,讓使用者選擇讓 app 讀到哪些相片:

Recently Apple added a feature to iOS that allows you only to allow selected photos to be accessible by an app. This allows the user to respond positively to an access request, but allow the app to see only a subset (or zero) actual photos.

It would be a very useful feature for Apple to do the same for contacts: the app would think it's getting access to your contacts, but would only actually receive a subset of them, and be none the wiser. This would be a tremendous boon for privacy.

Tim Cook 把 Privacy 當作 Feature 的偏好,我會猜在 iOS 遲早會推出這個功能,然後會宣揚吹捧一番。

至於 Android 的話,不太像是會在 iOS 推出前有這個功能...