Pb

Agreed. I thought the article was really interesting. I don’t know much about how the author got their data, it seems like it’s a Kaggle dataset and I’m not familiar with how that was procured, but the analysis was really fascinating to me. So was the tweet by the person who asked Zomato about the repeated separate instances using the same FSSAI license, which I looked up and here is the link: https://mobile.twitter.com/ManjoBun/status/1533113310106660865 : definitely no public follow up by Zomato.

The line chart was great as well showing the huge number of listings for that one kitchen.

I don’t live in India and I wondered what FSSAI is, so I looked that up as well. It’s the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India: https://www.fssai.gov.in/

The author is performing a public service that I feel ought to be done by the authority in question in the first place. I hope the article gets lots of traction and serves as an example for food safety authorities worldwide to prevent this kind of trickery.

I’m leaning towards subscribing to the author’s newsletter; at the end of the article they mention that they were the ones who posted that recent fake IMDB credit article which I also saw on HN, and I’m looking forward to reading the article on the early Indian internet (https://peabee.substack.com/p/15-mafatlal-and-the-early-indian). (I once had a chance to see Vint Cerf give a talk and while it was a while ago I remember enjoying it.)

Last note: I thought it was kind of…

Another similar tracking vector that lets any app detect all installed apps by using android.intent.action.MAIN Query: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/thread/332857106/privacy-concern-about-android-intent-action-main-intent-in-queries-element without the QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission.

No response from Google. Being used by dozens of apps in the wild.

Edit: Original Research link: https://peabee.substack.com/p/everyone-knows-what-apps-you-use (HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518866 , 482 comments)

I don’t often log in to HN to comment, but when I do it’s usually when I see this type of comment.

You can always spot them by the first word being “No” or “False” followed by a confidently asserted yet hilariously incorrect statement.

I suggest reading this [0] and approaching these discussions with more humility in the future. As you yourself stated, you’re an SRE, not a security expert, yet this forum is full of them.

0: https://peabee.substack.com/p/everyone-knows-what-apps-you-use

https://peabee.substack.com/p/everyone-knows-what-apps-you-use

This has been going on for years, Google knows about it, and intentionally leaves it unfixed.

> Out of 47 Indian apps I randomly analyzed, 31 of them used the "ACTION_MAIN" filter - giving them access to see all the apps on your phone without any disclosure. That's 2 out of 3 apps.

Of course there's hundreds of other variants of malware, this is just one of the most prevalent.

Google certainly hasn't done a great job on privacy. Android devices leak so much information.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/phone-tracking-tool-lets-government-agencies-follow-your-every-move/

https://peabee.substack.com/p/everyone-knows-what-apps-you-use

About Apple I just don't know enough because I haven't seriously used them for years