Google removes vital privacy feature from Android

A couple of days ago Electronic Frontier Foundation published a blog post lauding an extremely important app privacy feature that was added in Android 4.3 Jelly Bean in which the feature allows users to install apps while preventing the app from collecting sensitive data like the user’s location or address book.

Several people contacted them to say that the feature had actually been removed in Android 4.4.2 KitKat which was released earlier this week. As of today, they have installed the update to our test device and can confirm that the App Ops privacy feature that we were excited about yesterday is in fact now gone which is purely good news.