Why does Angry Birds need to know who I call?

[Strassia]

I was about to install Bad Piggies from Rovio on my phone when I noticed the list of permissions. Some I understand are necessary for the game to run, like permissions to write to disk, some are necessary for the advertisements for the free game, like network access. But one suprised me. Under “Phone calls”, I have to give the game permission to read phone state and identity. This means, and I quote:

@Google Play

Allows the application to access the phone features of the devices. An application with this permission can determine the phone number and serial number of this phone, whether a call is active, the number that the call is connected to and the like.

What is the purpose of having this access? I checked other Rovio apps like Angry Birds and it is the same. Why does this app need to know who I call and who calls me? What does it do with this information?

[Baron_Greenback]

Angry Birds just needs to know the phone state so that it can handle an incoming call when you are playing.

[Strassia]

@Baron_Greenback

Angry Birds just needs to know the phone state so that it can handle an incoming call when you are playing.

Shouldn’t there be a level of permission that allows that without allowing monitoring of the phone numbers?

[DrDeth]

Marketing.

[Colibri]

Moved to the Game Room.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator.

[pseudotriton_ruber_ruber]

@Colibri

Moved to the Game Room.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator.

And I opened this thread hoping to find out what Colibri had to say about angry birds.

[Lynn_Bodoni]

He’d say not to get a hummingbird angry, because they’re mean little buggers.

[Jragon]

@Strassia

Shouldn’t there be a level of permission that allows that without allowing monitoring of the phone numbers?

There probably should, but there’s not. I assume that for whatever reason they didn’t think it was a big deal. The likely reason is that if all apps, before being released on the store, are screened for malicious code etc they assumed they’d catch anything using that permission nefariously. It’s still a bad idea, imo, but I can see using it as a tempting excuse if splitting the two layers of permissions was more difficult than not doing it for some reason.

[voltaire]

@Baron_Greenback

Angry Birds just needs to know the phone state so that it can handle an incoming call when you are playing.

@Strassia

Shouldn’t there be a level of permission that allows that without allowing monitoring of the phone numbers?

The thing is, even if those two disparate permissions were separated, the majority of apps would still require them both. Because, even though what Baron Greenback said is true, most app makers (particularly makers of free apps with advertising) would *also *require the permission which allows them to access a “unique ID” to identify your phone. That allows them to do all sorts of useful things, like market the amount of unique “eyeballs” that advertising through their app can access for advertisers.

Also, using the phone’s serial number, they can tell exactly what brand and model the phone is, which helps them identify and address any problems they might be having with specific models.

[unwashed_brain]

I’ll second the guesses of phonecall state and unique identifier. Those are reasonable. Android doesn’t need to additionally allow access to the number associated with any calls for any reason I can imagine. It’s either Rovio being greedy when asking for permissions or Android exposing permissions at a level that isn’t granular enough. Either way, I give it 3 :dubious::dubious::dubious: out of 4.