This is article lies at the holy trinity of clickbait-(and-switch), alarmist bullshit, and a potential for actual investigative journalism being passed up.
Meitu does request a puzzling array of permissions [1], most of which are clearly not necessary for what is a face filter camera app, but mainstream apps (despite, as it says in the article, being backed by "well-known company names which we have already trusted our data with") do the exact same. I fail to see why it's implicitly okay for Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and half a dozen other apps to set cookies, run embedded browsers, harvest location and wifi info, draw over apps, request running apps, and use all of it to serve more targeted ads, while we should be wary of a foreign company doing the same.
Though the concern is not unwarranted, their tonedeaf delivery make the whole thing come off as FUD -- especially once they break out wisdom, and say, quote:
"But free apps merit skepticism. After all, they're generating revenue somehow. If you can't figure out the business model, the app could well be collecting and selling some of your personal information to advertising services looking to dole out more and more effective ads."
There was a potential for a very interesting tidbit where they mentioned that Meitu is supposedly in the Sand Hill program, some kind of project by Google Play for apps that may go most viral, but since they published the story without waiting for a response from Google, right now it's just a teaser with no substantive info.
In either case, apps like this just prove over and over again that mobile permissions (most acutely on Android) are still user-hostile, are designed with unhelpful granularity in ways that lump permissions of different utility and severity into one approval category, and are not an effective tool for users to control their data disclosure while allowing app utility.
Meitu does request a puzzling array of permissions [1], most of which are clearly not necessary for what is a face filter camera app, but mainstream apps (despite, as it says in the article, being backed by "well-known company names which we have already trusted our data with") do the exact same. I fail to see why it's implicitly okay for Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and half a dozen other apps to set cookies, run embedded browsers, harvest location and wifi info, draw over apps, request running apps, and use all of it to serve more targeted ads, while we should be wary of a foreign company doing the same.
Though the concern is not unwarranted, their tonedeaf delivery make the whole thing come off as FUD -- especially once they break out wisdom, and say, quote:
"But free apps merit skepticism. After all, they're generating revenue somehow. If you can't figure out the business model, the app could well be collecting and selling some of your personal information to advertising services looking to dole out more and more effective ads."
There was a potential for a very interesting tidbit where they mentioned that Meitu is supposedly in the Sand Hill program, some kind of project by Google Play for apps that may go most viral, but since they published the story without waiting for a response from Google, right now it's just a teaser with no substantive info.
In either case, apps like this just prove over and over again that mobile permissions (most acutely on Android) are still user-hostile, are designed with unhelpful granularity in ways that lump permissions of different utility and severity into one approval category, and are not an effective tool for users to control their data disclosure while allowing app utility.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mt.mtxx.mt...