Nothing Essential Space: Forcing Full Gallery Access is a Privacy Violation (Here’s the Fix)

Amudhan_Sundararajan

As a Nothing Phone (3a) Pro user, I trusted Essential Space to be a useful AI tool—not a privacy-invasive data grab. Yet, the app refuses to function unless users grant full access to their entire photo gallery, despite only needing to save screenshots.

This is unnecessary, dangerous, and against Android’s privacy standards. Here’s why—and how Nothing can (and must) fix it immediately.

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Why Full Gallery Access is Unacceptable

Your gallery contains highly sensitive data, including:

Personal photos (family, friends, private moments)
Financial documents (bank statements, tax records)
Confidential screenshots (login codes, private chats)
Identity proofs (scanned IDs, passports, signatures)

Granting full read/write access means:
✔ Nothing’s servers can upload & store your private media (even if they claim it’s “deleted later”).
✔ AI models trained on your data may retain traces of it indefinitely.
✔ A security breach could expose your most personal files.

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The Solution Already Exists: Scoped Storage

Since Android 10, Google restricted full storage access to protect users. Ethical apps now use:

MediaStore API → Access only the files they need (e.g., screenshots).
Storage Access Framework (SAF) → Let users manually pick files when necessary.
App-specific folders → Store data without touching private media.

This is standard practice—used by apps like Google Photos, WhatsApp, and Telegram.

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How Nothing Can Fix This (Fast)

Task	Time Required	Technical Approach
Replace `READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE` with `MediaStore`	1-2 days	Query only relevant media (e.g., `MediaStore.Images.Media.DISPLAY_NAME`).
Implement file picks via SAF	1 day	Use `Intent.ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT` for user-selected files.
Restrict saves to app folders	1 day	Save screenshots to `Context.getExternalFilesDir("Screenshots")`.
Total development time	3-7 days	No excuses for delay.

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Why Hasn’t Nothing Fixed This Yet?

Ignorance? Unlikely—their engineers know Scoped Storage.
Intentional data collection? Possible. Full access = more AI training material.
Negligence? Then admit it and correct course.

Three updates in six weeks—yet the app still demands full control over our private galleries. Why?

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What You Can Do

Upvote & share this post – Make it impossible to ignore.
Flood Nothing’s feedback channels:
- Nothing Community
- Play Store reviews (1-star until fixed)
- Twitter/X (@NothingTech, @getpeid)
Demand answers:

“Why does Essential Space need full gallery access when Scoped Storage works?”

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Nothing: Prove you respect user privacy. Implement Scoped Storage—now.

Err_404NotFound

Amudhan_Sundararajan Good point, I thought in android now only photos you select from gallery is what Essential Space can see, like when the media picker comes up when uploading an image or video.

pollenjh

Amudhan_Sundararajan I get that posting this here raises awareness, but have you contacted Nothing directly? Seems like a pretty sensitive issue with peculiar proposed user actions. They might slow down the process, even though the intention isn’t ill willed.

pixcel25

Amudhan_Sundararajan nice quality post, but personally i don’t think nothing will fix this clear reason the ai model needs training , they are getting free data so why stop?? . they will probably use the excuse of requiring to use you screenshots for full gallery access

Amudhan_Sundararajan

pollenjh Hey, I have. Hence I mentioned it’s been 6 weeks.

I contacted them through feedback, and then through mails. Posted about the same earlier. When one of the mod posted about what should we discuss in board meeting, I raised the same question there too. They’ve told me that they’ll try to fix it. But, then we got 3 essential space updates on playstore and still it requires full gallery access to start. Hence I posted it once again.

sean (1)

Has anyone found a way to use Essential Space without access to the internet, or am I doing something wrong?

Despite Nothing’s privacy policy claiming “when you record content with speech, the audio is processed locally on your device using offline speech-to-text technology”, when I disconnect from the internet and press & hold the Essential Key it saves a screenshot to Essential Space (which I do not want for privacy reasons) and does not show any audio recordings or transcripts…..

The privacy policy goes on to explain “transcriptions of your audio are sent to our servers temporarily for processing”. This makes no sense to me. All I want to do is leave myself a note in Essential Space, i.e. “Take a quick note for memory | Effortlessly record essential details for future recall” (quote from the app). Why does my private note need to be transmitted to servers in France, and my “personal data to service providers [who may be in countries outside the UK] which have laws that do not provide the same level of data protection as the UK law”.

All I want and expected to be able to do is perform the simple task of transcribing voice notes offline at the press of a button. The above is really frustrating because I cannot use Essential Space nor Key – a big USP of the 3a Series.

And as an aside, why isn’t the privacy policy saved to the app, instead of requiring users to first connect the app to the internet before granting access to the policy (unless they go via Play Store)?

pollenjh

Amudhan_Sundararajan Hope to see it fixed then, hopefully with the Phone (3) launch at the absolute latest since it’s just a huge piece of mind thing