I find this development interesting. It goes direct to the heart of privacy concerns in the smartphone market. I have noticed many applications that ask for permissions that aren't needed or support functionality that I am not interested in. More granular, user-based control over application permissions would be welcome.
AppFence is not yet available (apparently), but there are other applications that provide similar protections, referenced in the comments to the original article.
Protecting Private Information on Smart Phones
AppFence is a technology -- with a working prototype -- that protects personal information on smart phones. It does this by either substituting innocuous information in place of sensitive information or blocking attempts by the application to send the sensitive information over the network.
The significance of systems like AppFence is that they have the potential to change the balance of power in privacy between mobile application developers and users. Today, application developers get to choose what information an application will have access to, and the user faces a take-it-or-leave-it proposition: users must either grant all the permissions requested by the application developer or abandon installation. Take-it-or-leave it offers may make it easier for applications to obtain access to information that users don't want applications to have. Many applications take advantage of this to gain access to users' device identifiers and location for behavioral tracking and advertising. Systems like AppFence could make it harder for applications to access these types of information without more explicit consent and cooperation from users.
The problem is that the mobile OS providers might not like AppFence. Google probably doesn't care, but Apple is one of the biggest consumers of iPhone personal information. Right now, the prototype only works on Android, because it requires flashing the phone. In theory, the technology can be made to work on any mobile OS, but good luck getting Apple to agree to it.
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