Opening a space for an OS fork led by a consortium of mobile phone manufacturers that don't have a vested interest in supporting their ad and tracking business would be an overall benefit. Google sees value in android only for that, and that's a major problem.
Having to log into a Google account that uniquely identifies you across all your devices and milks you of every single data it can put its filthy hands on?
I am an android user but honestly between the two I think Apple is the lesser evil
Well, it’s not like Apple doesn’t also collect pretty hair-raising information on you. Go digging through some of the sqlite databases on your machine and you’ll find eg. a social graph that even supports labels for things like political affiliations (I think this db was the one used by their ominously named “intelligence platform” service). Another db (which I think was for the knowledged daemon) has an incredibly detailed log of everything you do on your computer and phone, including eg. web URLs and millisecond granularity events on when you interact with your devices. Whether that social graph or all that other stuff ever leaves your devices is unknown (although eg. the knowledged stuff definitely does since I can see events for my phone on my laptop), but I wouldn’t count on it not being sent to Apple – regardless of what they claim.
And yeah, sure, this is all to make “customer experience” better, but do you seriously believe that’s all they will be used for?
Edit: and just as a side note, I’m not basing these claims on stuff I read online, but on actually having looked at the contents of those databases myself
Sure! ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform (associated with intelligenceplatformd) has a bunch with graph.db being the social graph, but with others like behaviors.db and eventLog.db also likely being relevant, and I think ontology.db was the one where they kept more information on the tags available for the social graph. ~/Library/Application Support/Knowledge/knowledgeC.db (associated with Spotlight’s knowledgeconstructiond, which I think used to be called knowledged in earlier versions) has the other stuff I mentioned.
There’s also some system-level things in eg. /var/db/knowledgegraphd/ but I haven’t bothered looking into those yet because it’d require disabling SIP.
Oh you didn’t waste my time at all, no worries. It’s not like copy-pasting those paths from my terminal was all that much work, and it’d definitely have been better if I’d included that info right from the start. Unfortunately I couldn’t give any blog posts etc as a source, because as I said it was all based on my own poking around in those databases, but at least I could say where the databases were so others could do some poking around of their own if they wanted to
You’ve apparently missed the point. Graphene exists solely to harden security and privacy by disabling the googly parts of the phone. That is clearly what was meant by “without Google”
Genuine question. I used to be an avid ROMer back int day until I got really really annoyed at all the hoops I had to jump through to use Google Wallet.
Now I have a Pixel 7a and I’m considering ROMs again. So I am wondering if I can just relock the bootloader once I find a ROM I like and it’ll pass all the Safety net bullshit and allow me to use my phone like it should be, just with a custom ROM on it.
Ultimately you can’t know everything. At some point you have to trust someone. The graphene people seem to know they are doing imo. Ultimately everything is flawed, you just have to know when to say "good enough ". The pixel hardware is pretty great imo and they are often cheap, so I think it’s worth considering them given that they can be hardened in various ways.
Because this will get .001% more total data considering the low number of GrapheneOS users. Besides, this is highly illegal and would result in significant public outcry and legal consequences far greater in cost than any potential benefits.
And if you cannot trust Google with their processors, you cannot trust any other company either.
The people who install Graphene and other modified Android variants on their devices are a lot more likely to be monitoring packets sent from their devices.
Believe me, we’d know the same day an android device that had been de-Googled called home. That would make worldwide news.
@soulfirethewolf@ijeff its biggest lockdown is the security model, which even though it won't disallow you from doing anything you couldn't otherwise do (if you're motivated enough), it draws the line of tradeoffs to make. I gave up rooting and a lot of stuff (like contactless payments) for it's security and stability, and I'm fine with that, but you should ask yourself if that's worth it for you. If you have to go out of your way to break the security model, even once, then it isn't for you.
Don’t forget our vehicles are also tracking us. Soon our Ai trainers will have enough data to guide us in their path and we’ll love what they tell us we should do.
One more advantage of the used cars I buy: the cell network they can connect to doesn't exist anymore (the radios don't exist, the company itself exists, but they have upgraded towers to not support older cell connections).
I have never had an accident in my life and I hope to continue that trend. However, if I need to replace my car I’ll just get something else old and used. I’m fine working on my own car and I don’t need a fancy set of wheels
Apple has a better stance on data privacy than google because their profit model is being a premium consumer device whereas googles profit model is being a provider of ads.
Apple’s incentives are closer to the consumer since they want to make the consumer happy while googles incentives are aligned with the trackers because that improves ad revenue.
This changes the DNA of the OS.
Plus the integration of googles data insecure services with android mean that as a matter of actual reality then discussing the security of android really means discussing the data security of those integrated services. It’s unavoidable.
Don’t trust either of course but I simply do have more confidence my apple data isn’t being exploited as much as my google data simply because Apple doesn’t stand as much to gain and stands more to lose from being embarrassed on the issue.
And pointing to custom android roms that replace google services with FOSS alternatives is a technically correct but still wrong answer to this because it doesn’t reflect the reality of the overwhelming majority of android users.
That is what they publicly say. However more than one company has discovered they can double dip: sell their premium devices and still track them. So long as they are not caught they get more $$$. I don't know if Apple is, but it is a risk.
My ads got way less creepily targeted when i switched back to iphone. It’s not perfect but it’s the best option for people who don’t want tofuck around with degoogling and all that.
Apple is 100% correct. It’s the entire reason Android exists.
Then again, Apple also does a fair bit of data collection. I hate that Apple has been able to market themselves as some kind of bastion of privacy. They aren’t.
Apple is 100% correct. It’s the entire reason Android exists.
Then again, Apple also does a fair bit of data collection. I hate that Apple has been able to market themselves as some kind of bastion of privacy. They aren’t.
So Apple is not 100% correct. They are 50% correct because the second half of their claim is that Apple is somehow different and not tracking its users…
I believe the reason Google acquired Android was to make sure that Apple didn’t dominate the mobile device landscape, which would be a threat to their ad business. The data collection was just a nice side-effect, from their perspective.
I think you underestimate how early Google acquired Android. In 2005, Apple wasn’t even in the mobile device market. Nokia were the dominant handset in those days.
All cell phones are tracking devices. Unless you faraday cage them. But yes, both apple and Android phones give out way more information than just that. And I definitely would not say that I would trust Apple more with data that I would Google.
Genuine question: in what ways do Apple track iOS users (that cannot be turned off)?
I’m of the viewpoint that most tracking can be rather easily be turned off, and that android plays in a totally other ballpark here. But I might very well be wrong.
They both track you fairly closely. There are no winners if you are primarily concerned about privacy. Google is simply more open about it, and provides more access to that data to you (like timeline and takeout).
Actually, the reason Android exists isn’t so one-dimensional.
The company Android was initially concerned more with Microsoft dominating phones like they did computers at the time, before being bought by Google
They created two prototype chains initially, one touch, one that was more akin to BlackBerry
iPhone came out, they ditched the BlackBerry-esque one and focused on what became now Android
Google was mostly just doing what all tech companies were doing at the time, trying to compete in a mobile arms race for dominance. The data tracking was just a bonus. Appeasing shareholders is paramount. Look at how Apple created an Alexa speaker just because they had to as another example of this type of behavior.
Also, Apple actually has a long history of tracking user behavior that predates both Android and the iPhone.
Apple apps since some time shortly after the inception of OS X would (and likely still do) phone home to configuration.apple.com to send apple metrics on usage. Earlier variations of LittleSnitch could actually block this collection behavior.
Apple has since reconfigured the network stack to guarantee that direct encrypted connections to Apple are always possible above any VPN, or other type of network filter connection. So there’s no way to prevent communication with Apple on an Apple product at all now short of keeping it off the Internet or blocking DNS to 17.* IP addresses, which would only work on a network one has control over.
Apple has very explicitly stated in very clear terms that the health app does not share data with other apps or devices unless you give permission. And as someone who has given that permission (twice, once to give a meal tracker write permission and once to link to my doctors office’s application for read and write) it’s for every application. It’s not a “hey you need to let everyone have access or no one”. You can get fairly granular.
There’s always the possibility of lying but usually when a company goes that hard on saying the same thing is so many different ways it’s legit. They don’t commit like that unless they know they won’t get in trouble. Those kinds of statements could open them to false advertising claims if it got out they were taking your health data.
I’ll stand corrected on my original comment then. I hope that with Google being dragged through the courts at the moment, perhaps it may inspire more interest and conversation about how our data is handled and how it pertains to the implications around privacy.
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