
Show HN: Gizmote – Your Personal Device Cloud - pdhrona
Hi All,<p>We just launched the Gizmote app on playstore last week (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=ca.gizmote.client). The app allows you to remotely control and manage Android devices in the cloud while enabling the devices into monitoring and location tracking tools. Some of the use cases are a video monitoring system for your home&#x2F;business, a vehicle tracking system and a remotely controlled baby monitor. The app basically harnesses the hardware capabilities of an Android device to enable these monitoring tools. You can change settings of these tools on the fly with the changes taking effect in real-time. You can share events generated (video, audio, location events) with your friends and family.<p>Please do let us know what you think and any feedback is greatly appreciated. To realize the true power of this app, you will need more than one Android device to play with.<p>Thanks.
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Amir6
Good idea but I do not understand the necessity for the variety of permissions
the app needs. Can you please explain?

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bernardking
There is a page detailing the rationale for the permissions located here:
[https://gizmote.ca/permissions.html](https://gizmote.ca/permissions.html)

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Amir6
Thanks for the response. I do not see anything on why you need access to
"Contacts find accounts on the device, read your contacts", "create accounts
and set passwords".

P.S. Also as a personal preference, I don't like other apps having access to
my google account where so much of my personal information is stored.

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pdhrona
The contact information access is so that you can easily browse your local
contact list to pick email addresses from your contacts for the purpose of
sharing device access.

The passwords set are not set by us - they are set during the account ceation
process as per the GooglePlusClient API. There are no passwords captured or
access by the app during this process or any other time of the app. We receive
a token from Google that indicates authentication success or failure.

