A few months ago, I poked around the current permissions on the Android phone and to look at various ways of thinking about this as a reading or a history. One such drew from Fernand Braudel’s Long Duree. Using a series of tags on an old permissions file (this was originally done a couple of years ago), the tags fell roughly as I suspect they might do to show the addition of permissions by a tag.
The vertical horizontal lines represent the immovable blocks of Android being released, Snowden, and the GDPR coming into force. The Snowden is perhaps unsurprising given that the android permission has a pre-23 tag as well as uses-permission, hinting at the architectural changes*. I do wonder if it is worth running this again later in the year as the Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts appear. That would be an excuse to improve the visualisation as well.
This came about after doing some work on features and permissions drawn from apps and their manifests that was working through some R. I was also doing this with some work on the signals data from Unheard City that will be used in teaching later on this year.
*One can explore this further through the Internet Archive of the permissions page which I did as an exercise in Internet History. Although the exact date cannot be found, there is a small window that shows a large set of changes.
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