A new privacy feature in iOS 14 enables users to give an app access to a limited number of photos, instead of having to hand over the keys to their entire photo library.
The new app permissions feature was spotted in the iOS 14 beta by Benedict Evans, who shared a couple of screenshots of it in action.
There are lots of little privacy tweaks in the new iOS. You can given an app access just one photo instead of opening up your whole library... pic.twitter.com/k4N78BFaDp — Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) June 24, 2020
When an app requests access to photos on a device, the user can now choose from three options: Select Photos…, Allow Access to All Photos, or Don't Allow.
An iOS privacy awareness pane explains it like so:
Your photos and memories are personal. Apple's new privacy controls let you decide what photos and videos you share. When an app asks for permission to access your photo library, you have the choice to select specific items or allow access to all photos and videos.
The change is a nice improvement to the current binary option of either denying an app access to your photos or allowing it to get at your entire library of images. It should come in especially handy for when users want to give an app one-off access to a single photo, for example.
Apple has been keen to promote the new privacy features coming in iOS 14. Other iOS 14 privacy highlights covered at WWDC 2020 include the ability to give an app your approximate location instead of your precise location, App Store privacy lists for all apps, clipboard restrictions, and camera and microphone access attempt notifications.
Top Rated Comments
Came here to say this. Write only access for apps that can save photos, but have no business looking at your other photos.Also, there should be a way by now to allow specific apps to have “white to” priclidges to photos while also not allowing “read” access to the entire damn photo library.
I suppose you could put a “dummy” photo in your library, set the app permission to only read that blank photo, and it’ll still be allowed to write new photos.
It's two discrete considerations: one is a picker that invokes the file / image browser, the other is app level access to the photos library (which you explicitly allow via the prompt / privacy for 3rd party apps).You mean this entire time, apps were able to view any photos in our library? My understanding of how the picker worked was that the photo library pop up was iOS and once you selected a photo, it uploaded that into the app. I even vaguely recall Steve on stage talking about it.
So like Chrome on my iPad doesn't have specific photos access, yet I can still open photos to choose a pic to upload, but Twitter has read/write access, so technically it can add a photo, or read any photo from my entire library (which, come to think of it ... is creepy ... o_O ) So an app, without photos permission, can still do things like open a file picker to upload something like a profile photo, but it doesn't have any persistent access after that operation.
Sadly only few apps took advantage of the system picker, I blogged about this: "How iOS Developers Lie with Photo Permissions Dialog." ('https://cocoaswitch.com/2018/07/15/photo-picker/')So an app, without photos permission, can still do things like open a file picker to upload something like a profile photo
Been using the hidden folder to hide photos that contain ID and and account information. Now with this new feature I don't have to wonder if these apps are rifling thru my photos or even the thumbnails.
Would be neat to have an advanced audit feature where you could look at a log of all the photo/mic/location/data an app has viewed/copied to itself and when.
I disable a lot of apps cellular data to stop ads and phoning home, would be nice to also block WiFi access too.