Hello, I have a Pixel 6 and recently put a SIM card in it. After adding the SIM card, this "Sim Toolkit" app showed up in the apps list and has the following permissions that cannot be changed.

  • Sensors permission - Allow

I did not install any app from FDroid or anything like that. The only action taken was physically inserting a SIM card into the device. Under "App permissions > Sensors permissions", the "Allow / Don't allow" options are grayed out with a notice that "Device requires this permission to operate".

Additionally, it has the following capabilities

  • run at startup
  • query all packages (for what?)
  • control vibration
  • prevent phone from sleeping

The sensors permissions is concerning because, according to GrapheneOS, this means an app can "access data from sensors monitoring orientation, movement, vibration (including low frequency sound) and environmental data". This seems like a privacy hole if a cell network can access all of this through the sim card firmware. By "all of this" I mean things like sampling the gyroscope at high frequency to sample ambient sound.

Is there any way to disable the Sensors permission for this app (or the entire phone) so that it just gets all "zero" data from the gyroscope? I have no need for the gyroscope.

I'm sure the GrapheneOS or Google devs disabled changing permissions for SIM Toolkit for a reason. SIM Toolkit is part of AOSP so it's supposed to be there.

Sensors permission is added by GrapheneOS, not Google, so apps sometimes don't know what to do if sensors are blocked. From the website:

To avoid breaking compatibility with Android apps, the added [sensors] permission is enabled by default.

strcat:

SIM Toolkit provides a way for the OS to communicate with the SIM card to use these mostly legacy applets
some users need this
banks and governments adopted SIM cards as identity cards, etc.
not all of it is legacy stuff

srtcat:

it just disables itself if there is nothing for it to do

flawedworld:

SIM Toolkit is a frontend for the SIM card

The app can access the sensors, but that doesn't mean that it does. This also doesn't mean that the carrier gets all that data.