Well, it looks like kernel 3.10 and later are the "easy to exploit" so it sounds like we might be semi-safe on Maemo. Still worrysome.

I have yet to try this on my android phone, then again I don't use my android phone that much.

In any case you don't need permissions to run the dirty cow exploit, it's just regular code (but it looks like you may need multithreading enabled as well as being able to write to your own address space through /proc.)

In android I wish it were possible to fine grain control all the functions that they say on those "XYZ needs access to ABC"...

Just let them install, but the user gets to control whether XYZ actually gets to use feature ABC.

Even better, return garbage information.

Now that's what I wish could be done.