I had an odd message pop up on my Android smartphone yesterday and was wondering if anyone else has had one. It came from one of the Google apps (can't recall which one) and requested permission to turn on the microphone and camera and access my contacts list. Just seemed really odd. If they wanted to bug me then why would they ask permission first? I note there was only one option for the question and that was 'grant permission' - there was no 'deny' or 'decline' option!! I had to switch the phone off and back on again to get rid of it. Anyone else had this?
I've not had that, but this morning my Android phone, entirely unprompted, started speaking to me. It said something like "Welcome back, how can I help you?". I assume this was also one of the Google apps but I've got everything disabled that I can disable, and never use voice input. Very odd.
Might be worth remembering which next time, since it may make answering the question easier. :-)
The logical answer is they did not want to bug you. However access to various resources is controlled by the OS - and if the user does not give permission, then the app can't access them. There is no way round that at the API level.
Perhaps it was a so called "system level" app where a basic facility like the ability to make voice calls depends on access to some resources that would render the phone inoperable if denied.
That's a relief - I had a couple of those (that I sort of heard) but so faintly that I wasn't sure. Like you, my 'phone has a lot disabled, including bluetooth, mobile data and wifi (I use the last occasionally - very useful for doing a >300MB update in the pub without using data).
I dare say the Android OS makes it extremely difficult for independent app developers to get around the permissions aspect, but this came from Google, which created the source code for Android and it's not open for public inspection - certainly not the security related parts anyway. One can safely assume, therefore, that Google can access whatever it wants, with our without the user's permission, to an extent independent app developers could only dream of.
And the hardware vendors write their own software which is as arcane as the Android OS it is developed from. There are quite a few "Mi" apps on my Xiaomi phone (Android 11) which I don't use because I don't grant them access to what they apparently require to operate. But I am not naive enough to believe they don't do what they want to do anyway.
Reverse engineering takes a lot of time and resources, and is rarely as simple as is often thought. Many people refuse to use Google Chrome because it is thought to include spyware, yet they might use a flavour of Chromium on which Chrome itself is based, because Chromium is "free and open-source". But who developed Chromium? Google, of course. Over a year ago I read that nobody (other than the developers) knew what /all/ of Chromium did because it contained millions of lines of code. How many lines? Well, according to the Wiki, it has 35 million lines of code (I thought it was somewhat less than that). Android itself is stated to have 12 - 15 million lines of code. But it always comes bundled with umpteen Google apps which between them probably have a well over 100 million lines of code which nobody other than Google knows. And they aren't usually uninstallable.
I don't do anything with my smartphone which I want to keep confidential because I just don't trust it.
Most software like assistant ask you up front and in my case says something like yes no or only when app is running. This is on Apple. Now if it needs your address book as well it sounds more likely to be what or some other over the internet voice protocol. I note with interest that since Clubhouse became popular, many other social media apps seem to have sprouted audio versions, including twitter. Brian
I believe its a certain number of fingers in the middle of the screen or something like that. I know a number of people have recently been surprised that their netbooks have started to talk to them as there are now two screenreaders built into the latest chrome os. Chromevox and Talkback since the ability to run android apps started. Brian
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