The issue the parent is trying to solve is you don't really have fine grained enough control, or apps nag you and won't load until you give them everything they want. My mom has a cheap camera security app that allows me to see the live streams from remote. Every single time I open the app it asks me again if I want to allow it access to my local network. The answer is a resounding "no". If I could just say "fake yes, here is my fake network", then I wouldn't be continually coerced into giving permissions to something I really don't want to share. I can think of many similar examples, another really common one is giving apps access to my contacts. Absolutely not, stop asking me, here is "Uncle Bob" with phone number 1-222-222-2222. Leave me alone
I wish it were easier to deny internet access to Apps. It isn't a perfect solution but it prevents the simplest data theft. Unfortunately side channel attacks are still too easy: Either a cooperating app, or send once of high value data via a link click opening the browser.
From what I can tell, internet access is the default just to allow apps to have advertising. Too cynical?
Android originally could deny internet access to Apps which I found useful.
Certainly I don't want an extension or plugin to have pull access to the internet. That may limit functionality. But often only push is needed (e.g. blocking list could be pushed). No third-party keyboard should have internet access.
Denying access to apps: if you're on android, you can root it and use AFWall+, which just sets up a basic linux firewall - but apps are installed as individual users, so you can just allow the apps that actually need internet - messengers and browsers, and things you want to sync across networks.
XPrivacyLua for Android does just that. It requires LSPosed, which enables deep modifications of the OS and other apps. Needless to say, that has its own security implications.
Denying "local network" permissions is hilariously worthless. On both Android and iOS all it does is prevent software from sending out multicast packets (for things like device discovery, Chromecast, etc. that don't use DNS-SD), it can still go ahead and just start trying to iterate through the entire RFC 1918 address space and try to connect to everything on your network.
I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out how I would implement such a feature on a standard Linux system to sandbox apps on my PinePhone, but there's no sane way you can implement a standard "you can have internet access but not touch my local network" policy.
Well, maybe the best reaction would be to uninstall the app and give it zero stars.
Of course, if you've bought hardware controlled by it, that's unfeasible. Keep it in mind for next time.
I don't suppose there are review sites that mention how predatory and nagging a mobile app is?
I've basically given up on mobile apps around when the ipad 3 was launched and never looked back. The reasoning being that i got an ipad 1 when it was new, and you could still find pay once games then. But they all got replaced by free to play gambling applications mislabeled as 'games'. Then the news about utility applications tricking you into $50/month subscriptions came about...
