Blackberry & Gmail 18 Mar 2007 04:46 pm
GMAIL for Blackberry wants access to my phone logs?!
I have been testing a Blackberry 8800 for work and installed the GMAIL client. This was the message I received:
For anyone who can’t see it the message is:
The application gm_8700_v4_0_L1 is attempting to access phone logs. Would you like to allow access?
A couple of notes:
1) Google detected this phone as an 8700 but the application works fine.
2) GMAIL seems to function properly if I click no.
So my questions are:
1) Why does Google want or need access to my phone logs?
2) Has it always done this and I only recently found out due to my 8800 prompting me?
To say the least this makes me very nervous and so far the only purpose I can see for this is to allow me to dial a number from inside an email but why wouldn’t it ask me when I attempted to dial rather than after I open the application?
Update: Searching through the settings shows no option to disable this.
on 19 Mar 2007 at 10:43 am 1.Why Does Gmail Access Your BlackBerry Phone Logs? | RIMarkable | The official, unofficial BlackBerry Weblog said …
[...] Darren Albers has. [...]
on 19 Mar 2007 at 12:21 pm 2.Hashi said …
That definitely sounds a little *scary.*
It’s funny how used to this stuff we become. I haven’t heard this mentioned anywhere else. Does no one care?
I’m all for this shift to the digital, over the top networks — but when I see stuff like this, I want to grab my rabbit ears and hand on for life.
Hashi
on 19 Mar 2007 at 4:51 pm 3.Jason said …
GMail is invoking Phone.getActiveCall(), which returns null when there is no call. It’s part of determining when there is likely to be a network connection. (BlackBerrys cannot do voice+data at the same instant)
http://www.blackberry.com/developers/docs/4.2api/net/rim/blackberry/api/phone/Phone.html#getActiveCall()
on 19 Mar 2007 at 5:31 pm 4.Darren said …
Jason, thank you that helps explain it, so the application is attempting to determine if there is an active phone call before it connects to the google servers to retrieve mail?
Any idea why this shows up on my 8800 and not on any earlier models?
on 19 Mar 2007 at 5:42 pm 5.Jason said …
Yes, exactly (we do the same thing *grin*). There are a few other APIs to guess if there is a solid network connection, but this API has been around for a while, so it will work on “older” devices. GMail is optimized for OS 4.0, I would guess. (Notice how the menu is the same with the trackball click or the context menu key).
This appears on the 8800 because it’s the first device to ship with OS 4.2.1, which contains some new security stuff.
on 20 Mar 2007 at 3:44 pm 6.Blackberry Gmail Conspiracy Theory « Lance’s Thought Stream said …
[...] the comments on the blog posting at: http://www.darrenalbers.net/blog/?p=4 GMail is invoking Phone.getActiveCall(), which returns null when there is no call. It’s part of [...]