Privacy is built on trust, just like other human links, and it’s a shared responsibility. Just don’t expose your list of chats or an opened chat to cameras or other eyes to respect the privacy of your contacts. WhatsApp showing an empty contact list 1080×1920 91.6 KB Caveatsįrom now on, you won’t see people’s name in the chat, but their numbers. Then, enable Privacy Guard for the app: go to Settings # los:settings → Trust → Privacy Guard → look for WhatsApp in the list and ensure the icon at the right is colored: So, the plan: giving the “read contacts” permission to WhatsApp, but passing an empty list with Privacy Guard.įirst, make sure you have the app installed. Nothing prevents the app to receive messages from other people and you interacting with the chat normally when that happens other than the app reaction to the permission rejection. TL DR: WhatsApp refuses to work when you reject the “read contacts” permission. But the tricky thing here is that you can perfectly receive messages from other people without any problem (people you don’t have their number could message you if they have yours). Naturally, it asks for the “read contacts” permission, and if you reject it, it refuses to work. The point: the app reads periodically your entire contact list and saves it in their servers (the “cloud”) in order to build this sublist of people you can reach through their service. As most of you already know, this app uses phone numbers as user addresses, so you don’t need to share your address with someone, just your number, and the app will build an address transparently for you (I’d say opaquely, though). WhatsApp, a widely-used, closed-source, Facebook-owned, centralized instant messaging app that even privacy-advocates could not avoid to use sometimes ( thank you, network effect, ). They could (and do) disrespect the user decision not to share something with them. With Marshmallow onwards, the app decides which permission is crucial for it to work. #My privacy guard android#TL DR: Android pre-Marshmallow lacked granular permission-granting. Some apps just refuse to work at all when you reject any of the permissions they request -this is a bad practice that has been mitigated since-, while others consider some permissions mandatory for their mere existence -obviously, a camera app need the camera permission, but a mail client app could live without access to your contacts, as long as you don’t mind to type e-mail addresses manually. But apps could react to the rejection, and then act in different ways. Apps should then request them at each time they needed it, and the user had the ability to grant or reject them. #My privacy guard install#Once Android 6 was released, permissions of level dangerous were no more granted at install time, but at run time, asking directly to the user. That way apps wouldn’t crash, and they wouldn’t get those things the user didn’t want them to have. Instead of the list of contacts, apps would get an empty list, or instead of giving access to the camera, they would give an status indicating that it was busy. So the clever people at CyanogenMod figured they could hijack the calls those apps made to the system to retrieve data, and replace the real data with fake one. The user just granted all permissions an app requested on install, or they wouldn’t install it. Remember that before Android 6, there weren’t toggable permissions per-app. Privacy Guard feature dates back to the times of CyanogenMod 4.4, if I recall correctly. Introduction to Android permissionsįirst, an introduction to understand this feature to get the right midset for making it serve you well.
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