I want to add a personal anecdote to this very interesting article. Basically as soon as I fully understood that all my voice communications were stored by the

I want to add a personal anecdote to this very interesting article. Basically as soon as I fully understood that all my voice communications were stored by the NSA, by my ISP (and can be accessed by my countries government without me knowing), and by various other institutions and secret services, I decided to record all my phone calls. The rationale being that I could not prevent most of the world to listen to me, but at least in the event they would use what I said against me, I had a piece of the evidence and would be able to defend myself. On a more practical level, everytime I call a big company they have a prerecorded message telling me that the conversation "could" be recorded (they definitely record all of them). And those company (ISPs, insurances, government...) will very often promise thing on the telephone and then not follow through as they know that it is very hard for most people to precisely recall the content of the phone call, even less to prove it. So, it did put me in a weird spot legally as my country's laws specify that the consent must be explicitly requested to the receiver of the call to be allowed to record. The thing is that it is not illegal to record phone calls without an agreement. But such a recording cannot be shared or released and would not be receivable as an evidence in a court of law. I was perfectly happy with this situation, as already being able to precisely recall what was said during a call would alleviate a lot of concerns. Android recently removed (in v.10) the possibility to record phone calls (except to a few of their close friends apps, FB, MS...) They unilaterally decided to interpret my countries laws as an interdiction to record phone calls. On top of that, they made no official announcements about that, not even a trace in a changelog here or there. The worst in all that is that obviously, most people didn't understand that it was Google's decisions. So now if you go to a call recorder's app page you will see a mass of people claiming that the app is a scam https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appstar.callrecorderpro&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appstar.ca... . They even managed to totally shift the blame on their partners. Now, the only option I'm left with if I want to be able to record calls again, seems to be to root my phone. Which obviously from a privacy focused perspective seems unacceptable (giving root access to all userland applications!) So precisely as the article describe, I lost what I consider is a very important feature, I have no say or recourse in that and the issue is not big / mainstream enough to gather any attention.