Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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In what world does a VPN need access to Camera and Bluetooth? (i.imgur.com)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by LunchEnjoyer@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I am fully aware of what vpn services to use and not. I am not using Express VPN, I am simply doing research for a master thesis, when I came across these results from Express VPN. If you have any ideas or corrections, please let me know why a VPN provider would need to have access to these permissions.

Screenshot is from Exodus service, which let's you view what exactly perimissions and trackers each app uses. You can check out the results and the tool for yourself here: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.expressvpn.vpn/latest/

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[–] winterayars@sh.itjust.works 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Camera could be taking pictures of QR codes to make it easier to set up a VPN.

Bluetooth could be integration with things like Yubikeys for authentication.

Dunno if that's what they're actually for, though.

[–] BuddyTheBeefalo@lemmy.ml 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Best practices would not require camera permissions to scan qr codes.

Scan barcodes

Android includes support for the Google Code Scanner API, powered by Google Play services, which allows you to decode barcodes without declaring any camera permissions. This API helps preserve user privacy and makes it less likely that you need to create a custom UI for your barcode-scanning use case.

The API scans the barcode and only returns the scan results to your app. Images are processed on-device, and Google doesn't store any data or scan results.

https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/minimize-permission-requests

[–] ultratiem@lemmy.ca 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm going to assume they didn't implement this because money. Their app runs on everything, from iOS to Android to Windows. Cost savings they likely just flipped camera permissions and didn't care about small edge cases like these.

With that said, Mullvad is a million times better, cheaper and doesn't require even an email or account creation to use. They created a system that effectively anonymizes the user before they even subscribe.