There is a possible a serious privacy violation in the app.

Gattrun

Member
The app while asks for permission for access to the camera and microphone first, grants automatic access into the cloud folders and files of iOS, without any notification or confirmation of access prior. This is not acceptable given the potential for privacy violations as a result and needs to provide the choice to grant access or not before access to any or all, of a phone’s iOS files, as a result. As much as the app is useful this is a major downfall.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sorry, but I’m afraid that’s incorrect.

No apps have unrestricted access to iOS cloud storage - the “external files” command in Pleco brings up an iOS system dialog to open a file from the cloud, but Pleco doesn’t see any of those files, it only gets access to a file in your cloud storage if you select it from that screen.

As for camera and microphone, we prompt for those when you use them, not before. They do show up in the list of permissions you can give our app but they’re not on by default and only turn on if you opt into giving our app access to them.
 

Gattrun

Member
What about photo library access? It does not ask for permission to grant access before access is permitted.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That seems to be an iOS bug - we've had a few other people report it too (and it seems to affect other apps). It may be helped by deleting and reinstalling Pleco or by updating to the latest bug-fix update of iOS.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sorry, I double-checked and actually it looks like this is now an intentional practice on Apple's part.

Since we use the system image picker controller, we aren't actually given access to any photo unless you select it in that screen. We can't just randomly read data from your photo library, we can only read a photo you choose to open through that Apple-provided interface.

So it's normal that you can bring up a photo picker in Pleco without permission, but the photo picker itself is managed by iOS, not by us, and we don't actually get access to any of your photos unless you specifically choose one of them through that screen.

This is not specific to Pleco and would affect any other app that reads photos as well unless it uses its own photo browser interface (in which case it would need to request permission because it would have access to all of your photos in order to display that browser).
 
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