It should be noted that there are legitimate reasons for blocking screenshots; on corporate managed devices handling sensitive data e.g. files or PDFs for example. Obviously if the device is owned by the company then the company is well within its rights to control what functionality is available (just as a solo user is within their rights to control what the device is doing at all times). This is a bug where the device is somehow being tricked into thinking this functionality has been disabled by its owner, when in reality it has not been.
There are also legitimate reasons for blocking the disabling of location services. If I have devices with proprietary applications or access to proprietary data sitting in a secured room, I want to make sure nobody can take that device out of the room, and if they do, the device should enter some sort of lockdown or sleep mode so as to prevent the leaking of sensitive information. This is a legitimate feature that would make sense to implement on commercial (not consumer) devices. That the OS ships with the ability to disable disabling location services is not an indictment on the OS - it is only an indictment if the OS does so without your permission.
> there are legitimate reasons for blocking screenshots
Couldn't someone anyways display the content on one screen and take a photograph with another device. For text content, the degradation of image quality doesn't even matter. Doesn't that make screenshot-blocking a pointless exercise?
Security is always a matter of making things harder for the bad guys. Couldn't someone just bomb your safe, fly a plane into your house, send an ICBM at your car?
Of course they could, but you reduce the probability that any random person can do that by taking precautions. Screen photographs also betray information that screenshots don't, for example nearby surroundings where the photo was taken, any reflections on the screen which may show who took it, metadata that can be used to conduct forensics to figure out which device took the picture, etc. In order to avoid giving yourself away, you'd actually have to plan a photographing mission, which may be made impossible by the circumstances (e.g. the device is held in a room with security cameras, nearby coworkers question why you're taking pictures of documents on your screen, your workplace may not allow secondary devices past the entrance, etc.)
Whereas with a screenshot you just hold two buttons and you now have an image that you can exfiltrate through a variety of ways into the hands of the bad guys.
My understanding is this is a little bit more nuanced.
For an app to use bluetooth, it needs location permissions as well as bluetooth permissions. Reportedly, this is to prevent an app from using bluetooth beacons to determime your location without permission.
Otoh, it sucks for bluetooth stem toys; you can't use them on an Amazon Fire tablet in a kid's profile, because location permissions are not allowed for kids' profiles.
Its slightly wrong. You can't allow an app to scan for bluetooth devices without giving it location permissions because bluetooth scanning can be used to detect precise location.
This works exactly the same way on iOS or any device that supports Bluetooth low energy, since it allows very fine grained location detection. Try it yourself.
This has caused some issues for covid apps since, to use BLE on Android, you need to request the location permission - which people were naturally afraid to do.
But if you disable location services, you cannot get your location at all. This is unlike more privacy-respecting platforms like Android, which let you get your location from the GPS sensor without enabling location services.
Suppose Apple occasionally sent "anonymized" screenshots back up to Apple as part of "screen services." You could say you could disable screen services by not turning on the display, and that is what disabling location services is like on Apple devices.
That sounds like a bug on Android's part. If you disable something called "location services", then you would expect that the GPS sensor no longer works.
Why would you expect that? If you deny an app the location permission, you would expect that the app cannot use GPS, and that is exactly what happens on Android. If you want faster location information in return for sharing "anonymized" location information with Google, you can optionally turn on location services to do so. This is considered a big enough privacy invasion that Android devices with Google services ask the user about it on initial set up.
On iOS, if you want to get your location at all via any app, even an app that keeps the locations it receives on the device, you automatically consent to having your location sent to Apple, and Apple doesn't even tell the user that they're doing this unless they go out of their way to find the privacy policy.
> But if you disable location services, you cannot get your location at all.
I think this is exactly what the average user would expect. In fact, users may not think location services have been disabled if apps are still able to show their location after the fact.
Do you happen to know if the location look-up (probably for nearby hotspots) is anonymized or not? I can imagine this would be an issue if your specific query can be tied to a specific device. Obviously this isn't an issue if you have Find my iPhone enabled since you consent to Apple having your location anyways.
> I think this is exactly what the average user would expect
Why would people expect that they can't get their location without telling Apple? On Google Android devices, there is a separate toggle to turn the ability to request your location on and off device-wide in the quick settings toggle that is separate from the ability to turn Google Location Services on and off, which you have to open the full device settings app to toggle after initial setup.
