[Galaxy Note II Original Android Development] pulser_g2:
Totally agree. If CM followed a standard development process, feature wouldn't be removed, expecting them to be re-added in future.

I totally agree though about motivations - I'm happy to be entirely upfront with people. I don't have the aim to get this rom into more phones, or to make money or become famous. Instead I have a goal to many my note 2 be the way it should be. Not how someone else says.

I think the reaction to privacy guard is interesting to review - CM accepted it from the original guy (Plamen was his name, brilliant guy, definitely owe him a beer), and merged it into CM7. The issues of bug reporting due to permissions blocking were addressed by preventing crash reports to app developers when permissions were revoked, and displaying a button warning of this when a force close occured with revoked permissions.

The change quickly got negative attention from Google (I believe), and cm decided they didn't want to create a "hostile environment" for apps to work in. That's why even the original changes of pffmod were watered down to prevent mocking or spoofing data.

With cm9 the feature was removed. Steve (Kondik) even commented fairly recently that he was surprised nobody had made a privacy conscious fork of CM. I question why this needs to be a fork at all - what's so dangerous about putting users in a position to protect their privacy?

Eventually, after -2'ing my patch which proposed PDroid into CM (without any explanation whatsoever, check it on gerrit, username pulser), and users eventually starting to care, finally there is enough pressure that Steve says they are considering implementing privacy guard.

I pointed out at this time before development started that this wasn't protecting privacy, as it failed to protect the user from tracking by IMEI etc. This was passed off as being not within the scope of the privacy guard... Instead it only focuses on stopping a rogue app from stealing data like contacts or messages or calendar information... Yet totally overlooks the entire need for privacy from companies who try to track users based on their IMEI or other device identifiers.

CM continue to take the attitude that it's not necessary to do anything here. I continue to disagree. It is necessary to give users to tools to protect their privacy. Otherwise where will we end up?

But to give users a false assurance of privacy when it even advertises to the app that the user is using the privacy mode isn't a good idea - simple social engineering message asking the user to disable the protection would get round this. Much better to make such a privacy more undetectable to the app.

I have no firm proof of why this is the CM "way", but they seem to always be intent to be friendly to app developers and I know some of their leads are involved in apps... Maybe there is a connection here? I don't know...

It's certainly disconcerting that CM would rather someone fork to make a privacy focused rom, rather than integrate such features into the Rom.

And the whole debate actually started as a result of CM trying to turn on anonymous stata tracking by default in the Rom. Let's not return to that dev, but I personally allow those stats, for the sole reason they're optional. But unfortunately cm valued finding out how many users they had, over the integrity and ethics... Anyway in the end, they undid it, due to the amount of whining and bad press it caught.

Putting 2+2 together here leads to an interesting picture of a project which I don't feel puts its users first. Privacy guard should at least feature a warning it won't protect against tracking, and recommend a way to do that :)