Okay I have been seeing this posted by a lot of friends and some have mentioned the fear that comes with it. The permissions page is on every single app you can download in the market. Some apps have some pretty free range over your phone, Pandora for instance has permission to send emails to contacts without your knowledge. Now messengers has quite a bit of permission on your device, but remember, it does quite a bit as well. So to break it down. Identity- Find accounts - it uses this to log into your facebook to send the messages contacts- messenger allows you to invite others from your contacts folder to use messenger Location - messenger allows you to send GPS location to friends, as well as to help find local businesses SMS- text messages- messenger can send messages to contacts who do not have the app installed Phone- Simple, you can call a friend who is using messenger who also may have their phone number on facebook. Photos- you can add photos from your phone to the conversation, and even save them to your device. Camera-you can take pictures while in the app, you can also do video chat with some friends wi-fi - this should be pretty obvious, the app is designed to connect to open wi-fi connections for faster communication and to save data device ID- Read phone status to make sure it has a working network Other- there is a lot here, but the gist of it, basic things like run at startup (you can turn this off) so the app works faster, keep the phone awake during a conversation (it has an auto timeout), install shortcuts. It also has write permissions to draw extra processing power over other apps if needed, as well as read google service configurations. It has read permissions to control vibration, utilize full network access and to change the network connectivity (remember the wifi one from earlier). It will not however override standard settings with read permissions. Just use your heads, the app does quite a bit, most things are for convenience and fluid operation of the app. The news story is nothing more than fear mongering. If you want strange look at what some basic apps require, when a flashlight app is asking to allow file reading, or a wallpaper app wants account access or GPS location, then you should be concerned. Most permissions can be explained, some apps just take it too far. Messenger does a lot of things.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 03:45:58 +0000
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