Re: w/r/t Privacy

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Nov 2008, Kartikaya Gupta wrote:
>> I disagree with your point (1). Let me try to illustrate with an 
>> example. Say there's a company that makes mobile devices. These devices 
>> have a GPS unit but no internet connectivity. The platform on the mobile 
>> device is proprietary and closed. Third-party apps are allowed, but in 
>> order to use the location information from the GPS unit they are 
>> *required* to follow the user-specified usage rules. (For the sake of 
>> simplicity, let's say the usage rules consist of a duration, which is 
>> how long the app can hold on to the location data). The platform 
>> enforces this requirement by a relatively simple mechanism: the 
>> third-party developers are subject to source code audits by the mobile 
>> device manufacturer to ensure their code complies with the requirement. 
>> If it does not, or if they refuse the source code audit, their app is 
>> banned from the platform.
> 
> Does this platform exist, or is it hypothetical?

Nokia comes to mind. Even if the details in the example above don't 
match one to one they all sound eerily like the manic hoop-jumping 
around location permissions and security, generally, in Symbian9 / S60 
3rd edition.

That said, I have no idea how they plan to address this in the S60 web 
browser and the lack of any public input from them on this list is 
unfortunate.

Meanwhile, access to location information (via JavaScript hooks) was 
recently added in newer versions of their "web runtime":

http://www.forum.nokia.com/document/Web_Developers_Library/GUID-65AAF569-D347-462B-B59A-9D7CA184AB9C.html

Cheers,

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2008 17:04:21 UTC