from EFF.org: Yesterday, we published a blog post lauding an extremely important app privacy feature that was added in Android 4.3. That feature allows users to install apps while preventing the app from collecting sensitive data like the user’s location or address book.

After we published the post, several people contacted us to say that
the feature had actually been removed in Android 4.4.2, which was
released earlier this week. Today, we installed that update to our test
device, and can confirm that the App Ops privacy feature that we were
excited about yesterday is in fact now gone.

When asked for comment, Google told us that the feature had only ever
been released by accident — that it was experimental, and that it could
break some of the apps policed by it. We are suspicious of this
explanation, and do not think that it in any way justifies removing the
feature rather than improving it