11 ms·

Go through your family's phone settings and turn on all the privacy features

323 points by GordonS 7y ago

finnthehuman 7y ago
>TL;DR If Apple’s going to advertise itself as the “private” phone, they need to do a much better job than this. “At least we’re aren’t Google!” is pretty much the best they can say. It's times like this HN needs to allow the fire emoji. He's absolutely right and the fact we pretend otherwise is a total fucking lie that lets everyone feel a bit better about about the wretched state of our industry.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- neotek 7y ago
  For such a wildly ignorant take as "“At least we’re aren’t Google!” is pretty much the best they can say" I'd suggest the eye roll emoji instead.
rocky1138 7y ago
The other day I saw an ad for Barbie on YouTube. I took it as a sign that my ad blocking methods are working.
- deith 7y ago
  When I go on youtube, my front page is full of the normiest things of my country. Makes me think... either I'm really good at blocking, or they don't care enough to actually try harder to track me. Or they do actually track me hard enough and they are pretending not to by showing me normie stuff, which gives me false hope about how good I am at hiding my tracks. How far does the rabbit hole go??
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Even when I let youtube track me, I find that they often like to recommend "normiest" things despite nothing in my view history suggesting I'm into the things they're advertising. Particularly I mean clips from late night TV shows, ads for super hero movies, that sort of thing. Very mainstream corporate content. They know I don't watch that kind of stuff but they keep on trying. I don't really get it. I don't think their recommender is that broken, so it seems to me like they're deliberately injecting those recommendations contrary to their expectations of what I like. I suspect those videos represent the content youtube wants me to watch, rather than the content they think I want to watch. Probably those videos are more profitable for youtube.
    - Larrikin 7y ago
      I've had an ad blocker on my computer from day one on my work computer. From watching exclusively programming conference talks on my work computer their algorithm has seemed to guess I'm a guy so I get recommendations for programming videos, action movies, and things featuring large breasted women. Its pretty annoying for that to constantly show up when I go to the youtube homepage on my work computer when I've only ever watched conference talks.
      - o-__-o 7y ago
        I worked for a content provider who used to market their search as better than Netflix. Behind the scenes the execs would provide a daily list of what must be the top X results for specific phrases. Sometimes it was make sure some title exists as #1 in any relevant searches. What I’m trying to say is maybe YouTube’s recommendations are very loosely based off your viewing habits, but they would rather you watch Doug demuro’s highly monetized channel over randomjoeschmoe’s excellent non-ad enabled review of a 10 year old car
    - A_Parr 7y ago
      >I don't really get it. You get it perfectly. They'll try to make any connection they can between what you want and what they want to show you, but they'll just throw it in randomly if they can't.
    - 7y ago
  - rriepe 7y ago
    I think they heavily silo Google's idea of you and Youtube's idea of you to avoid trouble in an anti-trust suit.
    - creato 7y ago
      Are they actually that useful to combine? The things I do on google and the things I watch on youtube are almost completely unrelated. Combining them would probably just make both google and youtube worse for me.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Why would they separate just 1 property from the other 19?
      - SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago
        Probably because YT and Google are the only two of the 20 big enough to be an antitrust danger.
        rriepe 7y ago
        Yep, Google handles the most search queries of any site. Youtube is #2. Google has well over 50% of the market and over 50% of what's left over through Youtube too.
    - t0mas88 7y ago
      They don't silo them at all. The whole pitch of their Google Marketing Platform and DoubleClick DV360 products to entreprise clients is that all data is in one set and they can target consumers everywhere.
  - donatj 7y ago
    Do you like watching normie stuff? Like 90% of what I watch on YouTube is recommendations for my weird tastes, and I feel like without a recommendation algorithm the site would be largely useless?
    - CrazyStat 7y ago
      I never go to YouTube looking for a recommendation of something to watch. The recommendations algorithm is entirely useless for me. YouTube without a recommendation algorithm is just fine. I go there either because I'm linked to a specific video, I'm searching for something specific (too specific for the recommendation algorithm), or to check if any of the few channels I follow have posted anything new.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - deith 7y ago
      >Do you like watching normie stuff? I don't watch popular youtubers, I don't listen to (currently) popular music, I don't watch the television, I don't watch sports. I even get make-up tutorials, and I'm a male! That's all the front page of youtube has to offer to me: things that I'm unlikely to ever click on. >I feel like without a recommendation algorithm the site would be largely useless? That's because for you and many other people youtube is an activity, like turning on the telly. You open youtube and you expect to be entertained, and that's what the recommendation algorithm is for. For me, youtube is a tool: I open it, search for something, watch it, then close it.
      - fiatjaf 7y ago
        That's so sexist of you to think males can't do make-up!
    - Avamander 7y ago
      I have the same experience, I don't think I'd use YouTube at all if it recommended me the default garbage I see when I open it in incognito.
  - mendelmaleh 7y ago
    Have you considered that you might be a normie?
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    I get that on Youtube too, without blocking anything—just use Google’s privacy dashboard. The dashboard is overly complicated for sure, but they actually do respect your choices, at least in terms of what’s user-visible.
  - gastlygem 7y ago
    There was a time when I used a South Asian VPN service for YouTube, and I saw a lot of "single woman in your neighborhood" ads. I guess either that was the norm in South Asia, or that's what VPNs are for...
- Yetanfou 7y ago
  There are ads on YouTube? Not for me, which I take as a sign that my ad blocking methods are working
  - rriepe 7y ago
    This is great until you realize that Youtube is the only platform who can afford such user behavior. It's just another moat for them.
  - matt-attack 7y ago
    What ad blockers work on YouTube? Anything in iOS that is known to work?
    - Yetanfou 7y ago
      Don't know about iOS, on Firefox (Linux and Android) uBlock Origin works. On Android you can also use Newpipe [1] for an ad-free Youtube experience. There is another app called Musicpiped [2] which plays ad-free audio-only versions of Youtube content, as the name implies this is mostly meant for music but it can also be used for lectures etc. [1] https://newpipe.schabi.org/ https://newpipe.schabi.org/ [2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/deep.ryd.rydplayer/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/deep.ryd.rydplayer/
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Apparently not, since you're still seeing ads on Youtube. Which adblocker are you even using that doesn't block those?
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Tracking blocking, not ad blocking.
  - rocky1138 7y ago
    Yeah, sorry. I misspoke. As another commenter pointed out, I meant tracking.
- gogopuppygogo 7y ago
  I forget YouTube has ads sometimes. I pay for it so I don’t get them. I also have a lot of niches I like to learn about and travel monthly to Asia where I have 18 hours each way to watch videos. YouTube let’s me download videos onto my phone.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- m463 7y ago
  Obviously the advertising engine is divining your true wants and desires. More seriously, if a person was known to be a privacy nut, I would serve them randomized yet diametrically opposed "advertisements" (say barbie dolls). Periodically when their guard was down I would throw in an ad for a firewall or rfid blocking wallet.
  - rocky1138 7y ago
    Orwell was wrong: Winston isn't scanning for "outdated" words to take out, he is finding the perfect place to put them in!
LeoPanthera 7y ago
A whole lot of parents are going to be wondering why half their apps don’t work properly anymore, tomorrow.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
  Remove your own number from contacts list
- mrspeaker 7y ago
  Then as a bonus, after you explain why they don't work - you can help them delete half the apps off their phone!
  - akerl_ 7y ago
    I’m not sure if this was meant in jest, but ~“congrats, I broke your apps but don’t worry, you didn’t want those apps anyways because they’re bad for you” is unlikely to be an effective pitch. The much more likely outcome is that you’ll be marked as the odd duck in the family, and they’ll make a mental note to not let you handle their devices in the future. If the goal is to make people care more about privacy (or really anything), an approach that breaks existing workflows and shrugs off that breakage as being a good thing isn’t really a winning approach.
    - tripzilch 7y ago
      If you go in and expect to fight a losing battle ... or even just any battle. It's your family. My family already cares about privacy, they just find it incredibly hard to navigate the maze of settings and figure out what you can disable and what is hiding somewhere doing nasty useless shit. When I disable a setting for them, I ask if they use the feature, explain what it does. Or in many cases, we look it up together, because DAMN they made that shit hard to understand. I also ask what apps they use, and if I know any, suggest alternatives. Usually they're happy to get rid of a couple of useless apps that were giving notifications and other screen spam. In general they're happy that I help them. It's ridiculous that I have to, because my family is not dumb and they want to figure it out, it's just that if you don't deal with this shit every day, it's just a swamp and you tend to throw your hands in the air and give up.
drclau 7y ago
Though, he doesn’t seem to know that literally all settings for a particular app can be seen in a single place too. Also, the default behavior is to first ask the user, and with iOS 13 you get again several notifications from the OS that a particular app used your location multiple times over the last X days, with a scary map showing where the app requested the location too, and that’s yet another chance to change the setting with a single tap. Happened to me with Waze. Bottom line, his complaints are baseless. And no offense, but if he cares so much about the privacy of his family, why is he not encouraging them to quit using FB? Edit: moved to root, was initially a subcomment by accident.
- Kuzutsukake 7y ago
  > Also, the default behavior is to first ask the user, and with iOS 13 you get again several notifications from the OS that a particular app used your location multiple times over the last X days, with a scary map showing where the app requested the location too I'm an android user right now, but having the option to see when/where app take advantage of their permissions sounds amazing. What is this iOS feature called? Does anyone know of a simple way to do this on Android?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    I don’t think it has a name, it’s just part of the location permission system.
- hellofunk 7y ago
  I’m using iOS 13 and I’ve never seen what you’re referring to, I wonder how I can see a history of how location data was used for an app.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - drclau 7y ago
    There’s a screenshot of this feature in action here [0]. It’s about apps using location in background. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/ios-13-security-privacy/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/ios-13-security-privacy/
namanaggarwal 7y ago
And while you are at it.. Apply all the security updates as well
- blendo 7y ago
  Also power-cycle everything. Including routers and cable boxes. True, some systems may not come up cleanly, but at least after patching and rebooting, they'll fail in the "clean" direction.
  - remarkEon 7y ago
    Yep did this with all my dad’s stuff. It’s become something of a Christmas tradition, which speaks to the completely broken nature of a lot of tech.
bjornjaja 7y ago
It’s a shame this has to even happen...
deleted 7y ago
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cdubzzz 7y ago
The comment about the privacy settings location[0] is a little weird. You can access the settings by type there or you can just access all the privacy settings for a single app from the first level of the Settings app by clicking the app name. Both locations are useful and seem pretty clear and easy to navigate. [0] https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1209502327025090561 https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/12095023270250905...
- spsful 7y ago
  Exactly. And he complains about not being able to search for apps that have location set to "Always" or "While Using", but it is hardly a bother to scroll through the list of installed apps and do a once-over to check their location settings. He also complains about the "Bluetooth tab" in privacy settings, saying that companies would only need this permission for "crappy tracking". In essence, he makes it sound like Apple is in the wrong for having this setting configurable at all. But has he ever used a phone before? Apps didn't even need to request permission to use Bluetooth radios in older iOS versions. Besides, disabling them completely would break functionality for apps that need to search for bluetooth devices (Smart devices, namely).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - gruez 7y ago
    >He also complains about the "Bluetooth tab" in privacy settings, saying that companies would only need this permission for "crappy tracking". [...] Besides, disabling them completely would break functionality for apps that need to search for bluetooth devices (Smart devices, namely). His statement about it being used for tracking isn't too far off. Of the apps in the screenshot: Alexa: ok sure, maybe you need it to setup Amazon Echo devices Amtrak: ??? CVS: ??? Domino's ???
  - gfxgirl 7y ago
    both Bluetooth and wifi need the be more locked down imo wifi should require a whitelist of sites an app can access by default. any app that has WiFi access should not be allowed the scan my network for vulnerable devices etc. same for Bluetooth. most apps dont need this at all for anything legit. those few that do should default to some whitelist of devices they are allowed to access Apple/Google/Microsoft should be working to make this happen
brian-armstrong 7y ago
The title is a bit misleading, this doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Go programming language.
Scoundreller 7y ago
OK, but do you have a fake DNA service for me to sign them up for?
dangus 7y ago
I can see how this whole subject is very difficult for non-technical people. I think phones should get more of a universal, easy to understand set of privacy choices that you can simply apply to all apps and only override on a case-by-case basis temporarily, instead of making it this kind of regular housekeeping chore. That said, I'm also surprised a cryptography expert can't figure this all out: > It’s sort of amazing to me how hard this has gotten, even on iOS, which advertises itself as the “privacy” OS. Let's get this bit out of the way: iOS is the privacy OS. Android apps were using the camera in the background without user knowledge until Android P: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/7/17091104/android-p-prevents-apps-using-mic-camera-idle-background https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/7/17091104/android-p-prevent... And what percentage of Android users have Android P or above as we approach 2020? 30%? Less? In the past, granular permissions did not exist in Android. You were simply given a list of permissions that any given app would simply use at any time and you either downloaded the app or you didn't. Final example: Android lets apps simply write and read to/from the file system anywhere they want, until very recently (Android 10?). If I'm not mistaken, that means that any app that's granted permissions to the file system could just read common storage locations like your Facebook cache directory to gather personal information. > My wife asked me how Facebook knew she walked by a particular store yesterday, so I dove into the Settings. What a mess. iOS does not give these permissions away. The answer is obvious: his wife gave Facebook location access. > First, there’s this “Privacy” tab in iOS settings, but under it you’ve got this ridiculous and ever-growing list of crap. Every app appears multiple times, and you have to know where to look. On the one side of the ring, people ask Apple to make things simpler, and on the other side of the ring people ask Apple to expose more granular control. There's no winning here. And anyway, the organization is quite logical. It's organized by permission category. > Browsing the “Location Services” tab alone is a nightmare. There’s no way to sort by “Always”, which is usually the particularly bad permission you care about. (Although “While Using” is a bit ambiguous too.) How many apps do you have where sorting is an issue here? Also, "While Using" is not ambiguous. It means "While Using." The text on the original dialog was "While Using the App." What else could it mean? This is an interesting criticism because it's another piece of granular location control that Android either doesn't have or gained very recently. > And don’t get me started on this “Bluetooth” tab. Why do any of these apps need direct access to my Bluetooth other than crappy tracking? Both iOS and Android basically gave away Bluetooth access because it was never assumed that it could be used for anything serious. We all know better now and Android 10 and iOS 13 both added this piece of granular permission in. I can tell you that my Sony Headphones app and Apple Music most definitely need access to Bluetooth. > And even if you turn off location services for an app, the app may still get this data by examining the metadata from your photos. (I’m not sure if iOS13 fixes this.) This is not necessarily something "to be fixed," this is simply the fact that granting access to your Photos grants access to your Photos. If you gave your photos metadata in the first place, that metadata will be there. I do admit that I'd love some more fine-grained control over this (although you may notice that the iOS share sheet does add some control over whether to include location data in iOS 13 - I wonder if any other popular smartphone operating systems have this built in and installed on >50% of their install base?)
kareemm 7y ago
If you give photo album access to eg WhatsApp, can it grab and upload EXIF data from all of your photos?
- ReverseCold 7y ago
  Yup, that's what the warning is hinting at.
  - fretn 7y ago
    Do they have access to your photos when you go to the photo picker when you want to send a picture or do they have all the time access to your photos once you gave them permission ?
    - ReverseCold 7y ago
      There's two ways you can get pictures on iOS. 1. UIImagePickerController - This opens the system image picker and ONLY returns the user selected image to the application. 2. "Access Camera Roll" Permission - This is what WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. use so that they can show their own image picker UI. It just gives the app permanent access to APIs that can retrieve photos. Both leak EXIF information to the app, but the first one only leaks the information for a specific picture.
- izacus 7y ago
  Yes. Not sure how that's mitigated on iOS, but Android started mitigating this with Android 10, where Location access is needed to read EXIF from photos.
undefined_user6 7y ago
This link to a recent NYT article about mobile privacy options from the tweets comments is also relevant: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-privacy-tips.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...
braindongle 7y ago
A way that we technologists can help people understand the ming-boggling degree to which Surveillance Capitalism™ [1] is running things is to use code to pull back the veil. Some are trying to help you to see what's really going on [2]. Also, I'm thinking of things like automated NLP on terms of use/service. Phone settings will not fix anything. The genie got out when Larry and Sergey, in the wake of the bubble burst, said "fuck it, we're an ad company". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism [2] https://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/icsi/projects/networking/haystack https://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/icsi/projects/networking/hayst...
robbrown451 7y ago
Isn't going through someone else's phone a privacy violation in itself?
- chance_state 7y ago
  I guess this needs to be explained to some people: this would happen as part of a conversation with your family member.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  You’re supposed to present them with a 19 page TOS document first, then sell their data, present them with a completely different TOS and then leave.
bagacrap 7y ago
I had to do this for my mother's roku powered smart TV.
paul7986 7y ago
At our family gathering for our white elephant gift exchange my present was a Google Home Hub/picture frame (bought it last year yet no longer want any type of listening device in my house minus Siri on my phone). I was sorta surprised that wasnt the most coveted prize of the exchange that the majority wanted to steal. About half said they didnt want any creepy listening device in their house.
jijji 7y ago
There is the wife/husband of your relative who will go and reset those settings back to enabled for logging/geotracking only because they want to see where the other is going throughout the day... So even if you disable all this tracking, sometimes its beyond their control... Short of changing their password to block the other person from changing the settings.... One of my friends switched back to a flip phone because he was sick of arguing about it.
- bagacrap 7y ago
  changing to a flip phone was easier than changing the password?
  - advisedwang 7y ago
    Easier than dealing with the relationship issues it sounds like.
- Cougher 7y ago
  Spouses who mess with their spouses phone settings, use their spouses' phones to find out where their spouses have been, and who argue back and forth about these settings, have fundamental relationship problems that have nothing to do with phone settings.
  - ChrisSD 7y ago
    I'd be very worried about someone that engages in that sort of controlling behaviour, whatever the state of the relationship may be.
yters 7y ago
Why do so many services request to know my location when it is irrelevant to the main usecase? Also, many time privacy settings screens are opt out instead of opt in. Why do companies need to know all this stuff about me, when it has nothing to do with their product that I use? Are they harvesting all this data to sell to third parties without my knowledge?
- fierarul 7y ago
  > Are they harvesting all this data to sell to third parties without my knowledge? Yes. It's a secondary revenue stream. Even if they don't sell it now, if it turns out they have a reasonable good dataset they can sell it later on, especially as the revenue starts dropping.
xcavier 7y ago
Or maybe get them to install https://www.jumboprivacy.com/ https://www.jumboprivacy.com/ I’ve been impressed with their approach and how they make improving privacy easier
- codeisawesome 7y ago
  What does Jumbo get out of all this? I couldn't find much info on 2121 Atelier Inc. (marked as the company I'm agreeing terms with in the ToS). It doesn't seem like a paid app either... can't trust without this being transparent.
eisa01 7y ago
Making sure their gadgets have the latest software updates is more important. My mom’s iPhone was stuck on 12.3.1 even though automatic updates was on!
markosaric 7y ago
This is exactly what I've been doing last few days. Both phones and laptops. Switch the default browser to Firefox and change the default search engine too. Firefox will protect them from all the third-party, cross-site tracking. It's faster too. And if this causes an issue for something in the next day or two, you're still there to help them out plus the previous default browser is still there too.
- samstave 7y ago
  Do you know if FF is better w/ out-of-the-box settings than Brave?
- Austin_Conlon 7y ago
  Curious, do you switch the default from Safari to Firefox if they're on a Mac?
  - izacus 7y ago
    I do, because Safari has the same limited AdBlock functionality as Chrome team wants to implement. Firefox adblockers are thus more powerful.
  - johnpowell 7y ago
    My sister has 18 year old twins. They got MacBook Pros as graduation presents. They both got ones with 128GB drives which has turned into massive frustration. But we will ignore that for now. But they both used Chrome. Today I switched them over to Firefox with uBlock Origin. And with some wankery you can make firefox look like a reasonable Macintosh application. https://i.imgur.com/VaMnux3.png https://i.imgur.com/VaMnux3.png But so far so good. And, as I have commented in the past about the pihole and when people leave the wifi at home they worried their phones were compromised because ad people have lost their fucking minds. So now the twins can can have a reasonable internet on their computers.
    - scholia 7y ago
      > They both got ones with 128GB drives which has turned into massive frustration. But we will ignore that for now. Please can you un-ignore that in one sentence? ;-)
izacus 7y ago
As an added bonus, visit https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-personalization https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-personalization with their Google Account and disable data storage there. Also make sure to enable automatic data deletion under https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and Location History if for some reason you want to keep those on.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  This is fine if you want to protect against people cracking your Google account and looking at that data, but it's very naive to think Google themselves would actually stop collecting the data. Their business relies on it. They'd still be collecting it and using it as a signal for ad-targeting among similar nasty things in a plausibly deniable, not immediately obvious way.
  - izacus 7y ago
    This is going into tinfoil hat territory - Google keeping data after promising deletion would be a massive breach of GDPR and US contract law and would trivially result in massive fines. Sure, you don't have to believe what they say; but then again you should also probably stop using Apple, Microsoft and any other closed software as well. After all, they collect data too and they could also lie to your face about what their devices send to the server. It's not a useful way of thinking. Besides that - explicitly telling Google you don't want data collected is strictly better (even as a grounds for class action lawsuit) than not telling them that.
    - Nextgrid 7y ago
      Google is already not GDPR compliant, and they've proven they're acting in bad faith by all the dark patterns they use to get people to surrender their privacy. Regarding Apple, Microsoft, etc, their business is based on selling hardware, software & services. Ads make a insignificant part of their revenue, so there's less incentive to be malicious and put the rest of the business at risk for a tiny share of the profits anyway. Google? Their entire business is based on ads, there is no other way for them to stay afloat given their current expenses. So there's much more incentive there to be malicious, and they've got both the lack of morals (cf dark patterns) and the engineering talent needed to do the bad thing in a covert, undetectable manner.
DayDollar 7y ago
I wrote a privacy settings page, that for every turned off option generates a new privacy setting, making your task truely infinite. Actually, i added a way to see privacy options as bits, making your turning it off turing complete. You can admit defeat at the bottom of the page.
DavideNL 7y ago
Quote from the Tweet/thread: "And even if you turn off location services for an app, the app may still get this data by examining the metadata from your photos. (I’m not sure if iOS13 fixes this.)" So is this fixed in iOS13 or not?
- drclau 7y ago
  I cannot answer your question (yet), but I have a question of my own: do people actually think the location stored in a picture is more important from the privacy perspective than the content of the picture? I mean, people upload pictures of themselves, their family members, their homes, offices, places they visit, to a third party, such as FB. Is really the location stored in EXIF headers the biggest issue here? Think how much can be automatically extracted from content these days. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of the location leak, I just find it odd what our collective priorities seem to be, even among the tech literate.
EastSmith 7y ago
Mozilla needs to fork Chromium and Android and fix this privacy nightmare. Or EU should grand couple of billions to someone to do it. Privacy should be number one feature for every OS, and every browser. Either that or we need laws to ban location access and web tracking altogether.
- perceptronas 7y ago
  The last thing I want my tax money to go to: develop android/chromium fork. If some company is collecting data they don't require - they are already breaking the law
- coribuci 7y ago
  > Mozilla needs to fork Chromium and Android and fix this privacy nightmare. Mozilla is chromium and it is already a privacy nightmare. The only hope is in seamonkey or brave
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Why should they fork Chromium when they already have a highly capable browser engine? I"m really glad that Firefox is (barely!) holding back a full-on Chromium/Webkit monoculture.
  - EastSmith 7y ago
    "Mozilla makes browsers, apps, code and tools that put people before profit." - people are using Chromium, Firefox usage is dropping, so Mozilla should do the right thing - fork and de-google Chromium and save the web. Also, I am donating each year real money to Mozilla, without using its browser. Call it FUD, call it I don't know what, but on desktop I am using Chrome, with the usual ad-blocking plugins, on Mobile I am using Brave.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  There are many attempts to fork Android, some by big companies (Amazon still sells Fire devices with their Android fork I think?) Bottom line is that Android without Google Play services and Google Play Store doesn't work well: most apps are only on Google's store and use Google specific APIs all over the place (after all they are treated mostly like normal Android APIs). And of course Google doesn't let you ship those in an Android fork.
nesky 7y ago
This is one way to volunteer yourself to help them with any and all IT needs on their devices moving forward. I'm all about helping out on privacy related topics but unless they want to learn about the how and why you're turning on xyz they won't care in the long run.
forgotmypw 7y ago
If Facebook, Instagram, etc. app is installed on the phone, the settings won't help much.

323 points by GordonS 7y ago

>TL;DR If Apple’s going to advertise itself as the “private” phone, they need to do a much better job than this. “At least we’re aren’t Google!” is pretty much the best they can say. It's times like this HN needs to allow the fire emoji. He's absolutely right and the fact we pretend otherwise is a total fucking lie that lets everyone feel a bit better about about the wretched state of our industry.

deleted 7y ago
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neotek 7y ago
For such a wildly ignorant take as "“At least we’re aren’t Google!” is pretty much the best they can say" I'd suggest the eye roll emoji instead.

rocky1138 7y ago

The other day I saw an ad for Barbie on YouTube. I took it as a sign that my ad blocking methods are working.

deith 7y ago
When I go on youtube, my front page is full of the normiest things of my country. Makes me think... either I'm really good at blocking, or they don't care enough to actually try harder to track me. Or they do actually track me hard enough and they are pretending not to by showing me normie stuff, which gives me false hope about how good I am at hiding my tracks. How far does the rabbit hole go??
- catalogia 7y ago
  Even when I let youtube track me, I find that they often like to recommend "normiest" things despite nothing in my view history suggesting I'm into the things they're advertising. Particularly I mean clips from late night TV shows, ads for super hero movies, that sort of thing. Very mainstream corporate content. They know I don't watch that kind of stuff but they keep on trying. I don't really get it. I don't think their recommender is that broken, so it seems to me like they're deliberately injecting those recommendations contrary to their expectations of what I like. I suspect those videos represent the content youtube wants me to watch, rather than the content they think I want to watch. Probably those videos are more profitable for youtube.
  - Larrikin 7y ago
    I've had an ad blocker on my computer from day one on my work computer. From watching exclusively programming conference talks on my work computer their algorithm has seemed to guess I'm a guy so I get recommendations for programming videos, action movies, and things featuring large breasted women. Its pretty annoying for that to constantly show up when I go to the youtube homepage on my work computer when I've only ever watched conference talks.
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      I worked for a content provider who used to market their search as better than Netflix. Behind the scenes the execs would provide a daily list of what must be the top X results for specific phrases. Sometimes it was make sure some title exists as #1 in any relevant searches. What I’m trying to say is maybe YouTube’s recommendations are very loosely based off your viewing habits, but they would rather you watch Doug demuro’s highly monetized channel over randomjoeschmoe’s excellent non-ad enabled review of a 10 year old car
  - A_Parr 7y ago
    >I don't really get it. You get it perfectly. They'll try to make any connection they can between what you want and what they want to show you, but they'll just throw it in randomly if they can't.
  - 7y ago
- rriepe 7y ago
  I think they heavily silo Google's idea of you and Youtube's idea of you to avoid trouble in an anti-trust suit.
  - creato 7y ago
    Are they actually that useful to combine? The things I do on google and the things I watch on youtube are almost completely unrelated. Combining them would probably just make both google and youtube worse for me.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Why would they separate just 1 property from the other 19?
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago
      Probably because YT and Google are the only two of the 20 big enough to be an antitrust danger.
      - rriepe 7y ago
        Yep, Google handles the most search queries of any site. Youtube is #2. Google has well over 50% of the market and over 50% of what's left over through Youtube too.
  - t0mas88 7y ago
    They don't silo them at all. The whole pitch of their Google Marketing Platform and DoubleClick DV360 products to entreprise clients is that all data is in one set and they can target consumers everywhere.
- donatj 7y ago
  Do you like watching normie stuff? Like 90% of what I watch on YouTube is recommendations for my weird tastes, and I feel like without a recommendation algorithm the site would be largely useless?
  - CrazyStat 7y ago
    I never go to YouTube looking for a recommendation of something to watch. The recommendations algorithm is entirely useless for me. YouTube without a recommendation algorithm is just fine. I go there either because I'm linked to a specific video, I'm searching for something specific (too specific for the recommendation algorithm), or to check if any of the few channels I follow have posted anything new.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - deith 7y ago
    >Do you like watching normie stuff? I don't watch popular youtubers, I don't listen to (currently) popular music, I don't watch the television, I don't watch sports. I even get make-up tutorials, and I'm a male! That's all the front page of youtube has to offer to me: things that I'm unlikely to ever click on. >I feel like without a recommendation algorithm the site would be largely useless? That's because for you and many other people youtube is an activity, like turning on the telly. You open youtube and you expect to be entertained, and that's what the recommendation algorithm is for. For me, youtube is a tool: I open it, search for something, watch it, then close it.
    - fiatjaf 7y ago
      That's so sexist of you to think males can't do make-up!
  - Avamander 7y ago
    I have the same experience, I don't think I'd use YouTube at all if it recommended me the default garbage I see when I open it in incognito.
- mendelmaleh 7y ago
  Have you considered that you might be a normie?
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  I get that on Youtube too, without blocking anything—just use Google’s privacy dashboard. The dashboard is overly complicated for sure, but they actually do respect your choices, at least in terms of what’s user-visible.
- gastlygem 7y ago
  There was a time when I used a South Asian VPN service for YouTube, and I saw a lot of "single woman in your neighborhood" ads. I guess either that was the norm in South Asia, or that's what VPNs are for...
Yetanfou 7y ago
There are ads on YouTube? Not for me, which I take as a sign that my ad blocking methods are working
- rriepe 7y ago
  This is great until you realize that Youtube is the only platform who can afford such user behavior. It's just another moat for them.
- matt-attack 7y ago
  What ad blockers work on YouTube? Anything in iOS that is known to work?
  - Yetanfou 7y ago
    Don't know about iOS, on Firefox (Linux and Android) uBlock Origin works. On Android you can also use Newpipe [1] for an ad-free Youtube experience. There is another app called Musicpiped [2] which plays ad-free audio-only versions of Youtube content, as the name implies this is mostly meant for music but it can also be used for lectures etc. [1] https://newpipe.schabi.org/ https://newpipe.schabi.org/ [2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/deep.ryd.rydplayer/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/deep.ryd.rydplayer/
hombre_fatal 7y ago
Apparently not, since you're still seeing ads on Youtube. Which adblocker are you even using that doesn't block those?
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Tracking blocking, not ad blocking.
- rocky1138 7y ago
  Yeah, sorry. I misspoke. As another commenter pointed out, I meant tracking.
gogopuppygogo 7y ago
I forget YouTube has ads sometimes. I pay for it so I don’t get them. I also have a lot of niches I like to learn about and travel monthly to Asia where I have 18 hours each way to watch videos. YouTube let’s me download videos onto my phone.
deleted 7y ago
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m463 7y ago
Obviously the advertising engine is divining your true wants and desires. More seriously, if a person was known to be a privacy nut, I would serve them randomized yet diametrically opposed "advertisements" (say barbie dolls). Periodically when their guard was down I would throw in an ad for a firewall or rfid blocking wallet.
- rocky1138 7y ago
  Orwell was wrong: Winston isn't scanning for "outdated" words to take out, he is finding the perfect place to put them in!

LeoPanthera 7y ago

A whole lot of parents are going to be wondering why half their apps don’t work properly anymore, tomorrow.

pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
Remove your own number from contacts list
mrspeaker 7y ago
Then as a bonus, after you explain why they don't work - you can help them delete half the apps off their phone!
- akerl_ 7y ago
  I’m not sure if this was meant in jest, but ~“congrats, I broke your apps but don’t worry, you didn’t want those apps anyways because they’re bad for you” is unlikely to be an effective pitch. The much more likely outcome is that you’ll be marked as the odd duck in the family, and they’ll make a mental note to not let you handle their devices in the future. If the goal is to make people care more about privacy (or really anything), an approach that breaks existing workflows and shrugs off that breakage as being a good thing isn’t really a winning approach.
  - tripzilch 7y ago
    If you go in and expect to fight a losing battle ... or even just any battle. It's your family. My family already cares about privacy, they just find it incredibly hard to navigate the maze of settings and figure out what you can disable and what is hiding somewhere doing nasty useless shit. When I disable a setting for them, I ask if they use the feature, explain what it does. Or in many cases, we look it up together, because DAMN they made that shit hard to understand. I also ask what apps they use, and if I know any, suggest alternatives. Usually they're happy to get rid of a couple of useless apps that were giving notifications and other screen spam. In general they're happy that I help them. It's ridiculous that I have to, because my family is not dumb and they want to figure it out, it's just that if you don't deal with this shit every day, it's just a swamp and you tend to throw your hands in the air and give up.

drclau 7y ago

Though, he doesn’t seem to know that literally all settings for a particular app can be seen in a single place too. Also, the default behavior is to first ask the user, and with iOS 13 you get again several notifications from the OS that a particular app used your location multiple times over the last X days, with a scary map showing where the app requested the location too, and that’s yet another chance to change the setting with a single tap. Happened to me with Waze. Bottom line, his complaints are baseless. And no offense, but if he cares so much about the privacy of his family, why is he not encouraging them to quit using FB? Edit: moved to root, was initially a subcomment by accident.

Kuzutsukake 7y ago
> Also, the default behavior is to first ask the user, and with iOS 13 you get again several notifications from the OS that a particular app used your location multiple times over the last X days, with a scary map showing where the app requested the location too I'm an android user right now, but having the option to see when/where app take advantage of their permissions sounds amazing. What is this iOS feature called? Does anyone know of a simple way to do this on Android?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I don’t think it has a name, it’s just part of the location permission system.
hellofunk 7y ago
I’m using iOS 13 and I’ve never seen what you’re referring to, I wonder how I can see a history of how location data was used for an app.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- drclau 7y ago
  There’s a screenshot of this feature in action here [0]. It’s about apps using location in background. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/ios-13-security-privacy/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/ios-13-security-privacy/

namanaggarwal 7y ago

And while you are at it.. Apply all the security updates as well

blendo 7y ago
Also power-cycle everything. Including routers and cable boxes. True, some systems may not come up cleanly, but at least after patching and rebooting, they'll fail in the "clean" direction.
- remarkEon 7y ago
  Yep did this with all my dad’s stuff. It’s become something of a Christmas tradition, which speaks to the completely broken nature of a lot of tech.

bjornjaja 7y ago

It’s a shame this has to even happen...

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cdubzzz 7y ago

The comment about the privacy settings location[0] is a little weird. You can access the settings by type there or you can just access all the privacy settings for a single app from the first level of the Settings app by clicking the app name. Both locations are useful and seem pretty clear and easy to navigate. [0] https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1209502327025090561 https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/12095023270250905...

spsful 7y ago
Exactly. And he complains about not being able to search for apps that have location set to "Always" or "While Using", but it is hardly a bother to scroll through the list of installed apps and do a once-over to check their location settings. He also complains about the "Bluetooth tab" in privacy settings, saying that companies would only need this permission for "crappy tracking". In essence, he makes it sound like Apple is in the wrong for having this setting configurable at all. But has he ever used a phone before? Apps didn't even need to request permission to use Bluetooth radios in older iOS versions. Besides, disabling them completely would break functionality for apps that need to search for bluetooth devices (Smart devices, namely).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gruez 7y ago
  >He also complains about the "Bluetooth tab" in privacy settings, saying that companies would only need this permission for "crappy tracking". [...] Besides, disabling them completely would break functionality for apps that need to search for bluetooth devices (Smart devices, namely). His statement about it being used for tracking isn't too far off. Of the apps in the screenshot: Alexa: ok sure, maybe you need it to setup Amazon Echo devices Amtrak: ??? CVS: ??? Domino's ???
- gfxgirl 7y ago
  both Bluetooth and wifi need the be more locked down imo wifi should require a whitelist of sites an app can access by default. any app that has WiFi access should not be allowed the scan my network for vulnerable devices etc. same for Bluetooth. most apps dont need this at all for anything legit. those few that do should default to some whitelist of devices they are allowed to access Apple/Google/Microsoft should be working to make this happen

brian-armstrong 7y ago

The title is a bit misleading, this doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Go programming language.

Scoundreller 7y ago

OK, but do you have a fake DNA service for me to sign them up for?

dangus 7y ago

I can see how this whole subject is very difficult for non-technical people. I think phones should get more of a universal, easy to understand set of privacy choices that you can simply apply to all apps and only override on a case-by-case basis temporarily, instead of making it this kind of regular housekeeping chore. That said, I'm also surprised a cryptography expert can't figure this all out: > It’s sort of amazing to me how hard this has gotten, even on iOS, which advertises itself as the “privacy” OS. Let's get this bit out of the way: iOS is the privacy OS. Android apps were using the camera in the background without user knowledge until Android P: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/7/17091104/android-p-prevents-apps-using-mic-camera-idle-background https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/7/17091104/android-p-prevent... And what percentage of Android users have Android P or above as we approach 2020? 30%? Less? In the past, granular permissions did not exist in Android. You were simply given a list of permissions that any given app would simply use at any time and you either downloaded the app or you didn't. Final example: Android lets apps simply write and read to/from the file system anywhere they want, until very recently (Android 10?). If I'm not mistaken, that means that any app that's granted permissions to the file system could just read common storage locations like your Facebook cache directory to gather personal information. > My wife asked me how Facebook knew she walked by a particular store yesterday, so I dove into the Settings. What a mess. iOS does not give these permissions away. The answer is obvious: his wife gave Facebook location access. > First, there’s this “Privacy” tab in iOS settings, but under it you’ve got this ridiculous and ever-growing list of crap. Every app appears multiple times, and you have to know where to look. On the one side of the ring, people ask Apple to make things simpler, and on the other side of the ring people ask Apple to expose more granular control. There's no winning here. And anyway, the organization is quite logical. It's organized by permission category. > Browsing the “Location Services” tab alone is a nightmare. There’s no way to sort by “Always”, which is usually the particularly bad permission you care about. (Although “While Using” is a bit ambiguous too.) How many apps do you have where sorting is an issue here? Also, "While Using" is not ambiguous. It means "While Using." The text on the original dialog was "While Using the App." What else could it mean? This is an interesting criticism because it's another piece of granular location control that Android either doesn't have or gained very recently. > And don’t get me started on this “Bluetooth” tab. Why do any of these apps need direct access to my Bluetooth other than crappy tracking? Both iOS and Android basically gave away Bluetooth access because it was never assumed that it could be used for anything serious. We all know better now and Android 10 and iOS 13 both added this piece of granular permission in. I can tell you that my Sony Headphones app and Apple Music most definitely need access to Bluetooth. > And even if you turn off location services for an app, the app may still get this data by examining the metadata from your photos. (I’m not sure if iOS13 fixes this.) This is not necessarily something "to be fixed," this is simply the fact that granting access to your Photos grants access to your Photos. If you gave your photos metadata in the first place, that metadata will be there. I do admit that I'd love some more fine-grained control over this (although you may notice that the iOS share sheet does add some control over whether to include location data in iOS 13 - I wonder if any other popular smartphone operating systems have this built in and installed on >50% of their install base?)

kareemm 7y ago

If you give photo album access to eg WhatsApp, can it grab and upload EXIF data from all of your photos?

ReverseCold 7y ago
Yup, that's what the warning is hinting at.
- fretn 7y ago
  Do they have access to your photos when you go to the photo picker when you want to send a picture or do they have all the time access to your photos once you gave them permission ?
  - ReverseCold 7y ago
    There's two ways you can get pictures on iOS. 1. UIImagePickerController - This opens the system image picker and ONLY returns the user selected image to the application. 2. "Access Camera Roll" Permission - This is what WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. use so that they can show their own image picker UI. It just gives the app permanent access to APIs that can retrieve photos. Both leak EXIF information to the app, but the first one only leaks the information for a specific picture.
izacus 7y ago
Yes. Not sure how that's mitigated on iOS, but Android started mitigating this with Android 10, where Location access is needed to read EXIF from photos.

undefined_user6 7y ago

This link to a recent NYT article about mobile privacy options from the tweets comments is also relevant: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-privacy-tips.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...

braindongle 7y ago

A way that we technologists can help people understand the ming-boggling degree to which Surveillance Capitalism™ [1] is running things is to use code to pull back the veil. Some are trying to help you to see what's really going on [2]. Also, I'm thinking of things like automated NLP on terms of use/service. Phone settings will not fix anything. The genie got out when Larry and Sergey, in the wake of the bubble burst, said "fuck it, we're an ad company". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism [2] https://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/icsi/projects/networking/haystack https://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/icsi/projects/networking/hayst...

robbrown451 7y ago

Isn't going through someone else's phone a privacy violation in itself?

chance_state 7y ago
I guess this needs to be explained to some people: this would happen as part of a conversation with your family member.
lostlogin 7y ago
You’re supposed to present them with a 19 page TOS document first, then sell their data, present them with a completely different TOS and then leave.

bagacrap 7y ago

I had to do this for my mother's roku powered smart TV.

paul7986 7y ago

At our family gathering for our white elephant gift exchange my present was a Google Home Hub/picture frame (bought it last year yet no longer want any type of listening device in my house minus Siri on my phone). I was sorta surprised that wasnt the most coveted prize of the exchange that the majority wanted to steal. About half said they didnt want any creepy listening device in their house.

jijji 7y ago

There is the wife/husband of your relative who will go and reset those settings back to enabled for logging/geotracking only because they want to see where the other is going throughout the day... So even if you disable all this tracking, sometimes its beyond their control... Short of changing their password to block the other person from changing the settings.... One of my friends switched back to a flip phone because he was sick of arguing about it.

bagacrap 7y ago
changing to a flip phone was easier than changing the password?
- advisedwang 7y ago
  Easier than dealing with the relationship issues it sounds like.
Cougher 7y ago
Spouses who mess with their spouses phone settings, use their spouses' phones to find out where their spouses have been, and who argue back and forth about these settings, have fundamental relationship problems that have nothing to do with phone settings.
- ChrisSD 7y ago
  I'd be very worried about someone that engages in that sort of controlling behaviour, whatever the state of the relationship may be.

yters 7y ago

Why do so many services request to know my location when it is irrelevant to the main usecase? Also, many time privacy settings screens are opt out instead of opt in. Why do companies need to know all this stuff about me, when it has nothing to do with their product that I use? Are they harvesting all this data to sell to third parties without my knowledge?

fierarul 7y ago
> Are they harvesting all this data to sell to third parties without my knowledge? Yes. It's a secondary revenue stream. Even if they don't sell it now, if it turns out they have a reasonable good dataset they can sell it later on, especially as the revenue starts dropping.

xcavier 7y ago

Or maybe get them to install https://www.jumboprivacy.com/ https://www.jumboprivacy.com/ I’ve been impressed with their approach and how they make improving privacy easier

codeisawesome 7y ago
What does Jumbo get out of all this? I couldn't find much info on 2121 Atelier Inc. (marked as the company I'm agreeing terms with in the ToS). It doesn't seem like a paid app either... can't trust without this being transparent.

eisa01 7y ago

Making sure their gadgets have the latest software updates is more important. My mom’s iPhone was stuck on 12.3.1 even though automatic updates was on!

markosaric 7y ago

This is exactly what I've been doing last few days. Both phones and laptops. Switch the default browser to Firefox and change the default search engine too. Firefox will protect them from all the third-party, cross-site tracking. It's faster too. And if this causes an issue for something in the next day or two, you're still there to help them out plus the previous default browser is still there too.

samstave 7y ago
Do you know if FF is better w/ out-of-the-box settings than Brave?
Austin_Conlon 7y ago
Curious, do you switch the default from Safari to Firefox if they're on a Mac?
- izacus 7y ago
  I do, because Safari has the same limited AdBlock functionality as Chrome team wants to implement. Firefox adblockers are thus more powerful.
- johnpowell 7y ago
  My sister has 18 year old twins. They got MacBook Pros as graduation presents. They both got ones with 128GB drives which has turned into massive frustration. But we will ignore that for now. But they both used Chrome. Today I switched them over to Firefox with uBlock Origin. And with some wankery you can make firefox look like a reasonable Macintosh application. https://i.imgur.com/VaMnux3.png https://i.imgur.com/VaMnux3.png But so far so good. And, as I have commented in the past about the pihole and when people leave the wifi at home they worried their phones were compromised because ad people have lost their fucking minds. So now the twins can can have a reasonable internet on their computers.
  - scholia 7y ago
    > They both got ones with 128GB drives which has turned into massive frustration. But we will ignore that for now. Please can you un-ignore that in one sentence? ;-)

izacus 7y ago

As an added bonus, visit https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-personalization https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-personalization with their Google Account and disable data storage there. Also make sure to enable automatic data deletion under https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and Location History if for some reason you want to keep those on.

Nextgrid 7y ago
This is fine if you want to protect against people cracking your Google account and looking at that data, but it's very naive to think Google themselves would actually stop collecting the data. Their business relies on it. They'd still be collecting it and using it as a signal for ad-targeting among similar nasty things in a plausibly deniable, not immediately obvious way.
- izacus 7y ago
  This is going into tinfoil hat territory - Google keeping data after promising deletion would be a massive breach of GDPR and US contract law and would trivially result in massive fines. Sure, you don't have to believe what they say; but then again you should also probably stop using Apple, Microsoft and any other closed software as well. After all, they collect data too and they could also lie to your face about what their devices send to the server. It's not a useful way of thinking. Besides that - explicitly telling Google you don't want data collected is strictly better (even as a grounds for class action lawsuit) than not telling them that.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    Google is already not GDPR compliant, and they've proven they're acting in bad faith by all the dark patterns they use to get people to surrender their privacy. Regarding Apple, Microsoft, etc, their business is based on selling hardware, software & services. Ads make a insignificant part of their revenue, so there's less incentive to be malicious and put the rest of the business at risk for a tiny share of the profits anyway. Google? Their entire business is based on ads, there is no other way for them to stay afloat given their current expenses. So there's much more incentive there to be malicious, and they've got both the lack of morals (cf dark patterns) and the engineering talent needed to do the bad thing in a covert, undetectable manner.

DayDollar 7y ago

I wrote a privacy settings page, that for every turned off option generates a new privacy setting, making your task truely infinite. Actually, i added a way to see privacy options as bits, making your turning it off turing complete. You can admit defeat at the bottom of the page.

DavideNL 7y ago

Quote from the Tweet/thread: "And even if you turn off location services for an app, the app may still get this data by examining the metadata from your photos. (I’m not sure if iOS13 fixes this.)" So is this fixed in iOS13 or not?

drclau 7y ago
I cannot answer your question (yet), but I have a question of my own: do people actually think the location stored in a picture is more important from the privacy perspective than the content of the picture? I mean, people upload pictures of themselves, their family members, their homes, offices, places they visit, to a third party, such as FB. Is really the location stored in EXIF headers the biggest issue here? Think how much can be automatically extracted from content these days. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of the location leak, I just find it odd what our collective priorities seem to be, even among the tech literate.

EastSmith 7y ago

Mozilla needs to fork Chromium and Android and fix this privacy nightmare. Or EU should grand couple of billions to someone to do it. Privacy should be number one feature for every OS, and every browser. Either that or we need laws to ban location access and web tracking altogether.

perceptronas 7y ago
The last thing I want my tax money to go to: develop android/chromium fork. If some company is collecting data they don't require - they are already breaking the law
coribuci 7y ago
> Mozilla needs to fork Chromium and Android and fix this privacy nightmare. Mozilla is chromium and it is already a privacy nightmare. The only hope is in seamonkey or brave
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Why should they fork Chromium when they already have a highly capable browser engine? I"m really glad that Firefox is (barely!) holding back a full-on Chromium/Webkit monoculture.
- EastSmith 7y ago
  "Mozilla makes browsers, apps, code and tools that put people before profit." - people are using Chromium, Firefox usage is dropping, so Mozilla should do the right thing - fork and de-google Chromium and save the web. Also, I am donating each year real money to Mozilla, without using its browser. Call it FUD, call it I don't know what, but on desktop I am using Chrome, with the usual ad-blocking plugins, on Mobile I am using Brave.
wongarsu 7y ago
There are many attempts to fork Android, some by big companies (Amazon still sells Fire devices with their Android fork I think?) Bottom line is that Android without Google Play services and Google Play Store doesn't work well: most apps are only on Google's store and use Google specific APIs all over the place (after all they are treated mostly like normal Android APIs). And of course Google doesn't let you ship those in an Android fork.

nesky 7y ago

This is one way to volunteer yourself to help them with any and all IT needs on their devices moving forward. I'm all about helping out on privacy related topics but unless they want to learn about the how and why you're turning on xyz they won't care in the long run.

forgotmypw 7y ago

If Facebook, Instagram, etc. app is installed on the phone, the settings won't help much.