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If you care about personal privacy and security of your friends and family, you should discourage them from using Android.

• growse 9y ago
  Of course, this is meaningless without context. Privacy from who? Security from what? What's the perceived threat we're trying to protect against? Everything is a tradeoff. To absolutely protect your privacy, you must never be seen in public or interact with any other party in any way.
  • Brakenshire 9y ago
    This is sophistry, privacy in the sense that a private company is not continuously compiling a list of every location you visit throughout your life.
    • growse 9y ago
      Claiming sophistry doesn't make it so, you have to try a little harder than that. The original assertion was "If you care about privacy, don't use Android". A more nuanced and useful assertion would be this: If you don't trust a specific private company with your information, don't volunteer it to them. If you don't trust Apple/Google/Microsoft with all of your data, don't buy a device with a radio they have root access on and store all your data on it and carry it with you everywhere you go. This isn't Android-specific.
      • Brakenshire 9y ago
        Sophistry in the sense that according to any reasonable idea of privacy, meeting someone in public, so that they know where you are, your name and your face, is distinctly different from a private company knowing exactly where you are at all moments. Imagine if it came out that a company had hired private investigators to follow you around, and collected a list of every location you visited. You tell someone else, and they say "if you really cared about privacy, you should not have come out in public, for instance I met you, and now I know your name, and that you visit this place". It is just nowhere near equivalent.
        • aeorgnoieang 9y ago
          > a private company knowing exactly where you are at all moments Someone else commented that this has already been the case for ... at least a decade, for basically everyone (in the U.S.) – the cell phone carriers are those private companies. And there is substantial evidence that they're even less trustworthy than Google.
          • gatmne 9y ago
            So Google gets a free pass for collecting information the user explicitly opted not to provide because another company does it too? I hope you realize how flawed that line of logic is.
          • Brakenshire 9y ago
            Telecommunications companies are utilities whose use of this data is highly regulated. Google not only has locaton, it has contacts, browsing history, calendar, gmail, etc, and it has the legal right to combine this information together.
    • cube2222 9y ago
      And? How does that matter? What's dangerous in them collecting my location information? I actually have location history in google maps turned on deliberately. You can't imagine how often it helped me to know where I was exactly, one and a half year ago, at a precise time. (That's how I managed to get a copy of my nexus 5x's warranty papers after it died on me) I don't really care about them collecting info about where I go, because it's actually useful for me. I probably would care if they were a small company with no record, but I do know that the worst Google can do is to target ads based on where I am. I deeply hate ads, I prefer to pay, and I actually often pay the "no-ads" premium if it's available, but if I do get ads, I prefer them to be as personalized as they can possibly be, because this way they are at least mildly useful sometimes.
      • katastic 9y ago
        >And? How does that matter? What's dangerous in them collecting my location information? What's dangerous about them compiling your medical history? Who are you afraid of? Oh wait, that's a HIPAA violation. I wonder if they keep track of the location of every doctor's office you visit... and that abortion clinic... and that methadone clinic. Surely, nothing to lose there. The only information that isn't hackable, is information that's never gathered in the first place. The more valuable the information, the more likely someone will spend nation-state amounts of dollars to get it. I propose Donald Trump use the NSA (legally) to steal all of this information to track illegal immigrants who pass between Mexico and the USA border who don't have a passport on file. And then send SWAT officers to break into everyone's current location, throw them into vans, and send them back over to Mexico. Wow, that's really fucked up, huh? And Google made it possible.
        • deleted 9y ago
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        • cube2222 9y ago
          I do think that people wanting to break into my medical history, could much easier just break into the system where my doctors hold my medical documentation, at least that's 100x easier than breaking into Google. The medical clinics have to check my ID anyways, so they have all the info about me. As for the second one: yes, if I'd be doing something inherently illegal, having a phone with Google on it could be kind of dangerous to me. As I'm not doing anything like that, I have no reason not to use it. Yes, with technology comes digitalization of information, and people can hack any of the places my information is, wherein Google is one of the most secure comparatively. You could argue that digitalization is bad, but before that, you could just find info on patients in the dumpster of the clinic.
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  • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Android is bad for pretty much all threat models. - Worried about Google? Android is bad. Google collects your data. - Worried about the government? Since Google must obey warrants for your data, Android is bad. - Worried about malicious third parties? Since Google has failed to patch even the Pixel line for KRACK until the December update... yeah, Android is bad. And malware through the Play Store that hits large numbers of devices is quite common. To be clear: I greatly dislike iPhones. But Apple controls their store with a quality approval methodology, they patch all of the devices on their platform promptly going back a number of years, their business model is not built around data mining, and their privacy features have frustrated and irritated the government. I dislike the iPhone, but if you want privacy and security, you should get an iPhone.
    • growse 9y ago
      So you trust Apple more than Google. Great! Don't expect everyone to come to the same conclustion. Trust is not objective. > I dislike the iPhone, but if you want privacy and security, you should get an iPhone. If you want privacy and security, don't buy a smartphone.
    • UncleMeat 9y ago
      You should be assuming that all networks are pwned anyway. KRACK was exciting, but really isn't a major threat to people.
      • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        This is true and false. It is good to assume your Wi-Fi networks are insecure, and I've done so for a long time. But the fact that WPA2 is not the lynchpin of your entire security plan doesn't mean that WPA2 being effectively nullified isn't a massive layer of security being ripped off. WPA2 working correctly does not guarantee that you are secure, but WPA2 working correctly means it is much harder for someone to do something malicious. The fanboy crowd has leaned heavily on Google's push to get sites to use HTTPS everywhere as a reason to suggest KRACK isn't a big deal, but the reality is a massive amount of Internet traffic still isn't HTTPS, and more than likely, never will be.
  • Feniks 9y ago
    "Privacy from who? Security from what?" The marketing parasite. I know in the US it has taken over the host so I guess its up to Brussels.
• Manicdave 9y ago
  What about iOS devices?
• imiric 9y ago
  What can Android or other mobile OS users do to protect their privacy? Is there a mobile OS that genuinely takes privacy seriously, yet is easy to install and use?
  • iaml 9y ago
    My guess is flashing LineageOS + microG + yalp store is closest you can get.
    • endemic 9y ago
      I'm very tempted to go down this route, but it seems to fail the "easy to install and use" bit.
      • matogato 9y ago
        I am a very happy LineageOS user. The installation wasn't difficult: you only need a supported phone and like 1-2 hour of spare time for backup, reading docs, flash and restore the apps. I suggest you to give LineageOS a try!
        • FridgeSeal 9y ago
          I like LineageOS but my phone (HTC 10) slowed down to the point of being unusable that I went with a different ROM. Haven't gotten around to it yet, but I'll try and replicate the benefits of Privacy Guard using one of the privacy tools in the Xposed framework (via Magisk framework).
        • abawany 9y ago
          Another happy LineageOS user, on a Samsung Note 2 (old phone but fast enough to be my daily driver). Works very well and love the Privacy Guard fine-grained controls for apps.
        • iaml 9y ago
          AFAIK even if you use LineageOS, gapps will still phone home and there is nothing you can do about it. MicroG/yalt is the most user unfriendly thing in this combo, far worse than just flashing custom rom, but it gets rid of it.
• angryasian 9y ago
  If you care that much about your privacy and security you shouldn't use a cell phone at all. Your ISP's and network will be the biggest offender of collecting and selling your data.
• barrkel 9y ago
  They shouldn't use a phone at all, or the web, or email.
• module0000 9y ago
  > ....you should discourage them from using Android. You should discourage them from carrying a portable radio transceiver, ie a cell phone, with them at all times. You only know about this because you read it in the news - Android is not the only outfit doing this. Sending tower-data back home is a fundamental part of your cell phone's operation. Without that information, your carrier would have no idea which tower to route incoming data/calls to.
  • scott_karana 9y ago
    What the hell happened to the principle of least privilege?! Yes, your carrier already has this information, and should be considered depending on the threat model you're concerned about. However, NO, this does not mean that other unrelated parties have any business with the data! The attack surface goes up exponentially with every additional data holder.