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Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers
- tomohawk 6y agoThis is how fascism works. You don't own the data about you - Google does. So, whoever controls government can just ask Google for information about you. No warrant required.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoWarrant is required though.
- tgv 6y agoFilm at eleven.
- meibo 6y agoIs posting such baity non-journalism on here nowadays a way to farm karma? This doesn't give anyone actual value, most of the things listed are common sense and if you use Google Maps, you are probably already aware of it. I'd wager that some people use Maps exactly because these features make it convenient.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoYes the fact that I can check my phone in the morning for my commute and get an accurate (ish) bus time including delays is great, I can avoid a long wait for a bus at and have another cup of coffee. Though as I live next door to a pub in my village it used to keep checking me in - google probably thinks I have a drinking problem :-)
- jwr 6y agoWhile this article might look obvious to you, most people will be surprised by what they read. We need more articles like this, so that everybody realizes how their data is used, processed, farmed, and sold.
- vixen99 6y agoTry not to imagine everyone sees the world through your eyes.
- yreg 6y agoThis is hn, I expect the content of the article to be obvious to everyone here.
- stinos 6y ago'most' perhaps, 'everyone', not so much
- Hnrobert42 6y agoThe other comments show this is not obvious to everyone.
- yreg 6y agoNone of the other commenters show surprise about any of it. This is just another generic unfruitful "google bad" circlejerk thread, no one learned anything new from it. Sorry, I don't mean to argue with you, I just disagreed with the "accusation" against meibo.
- Applethief 6y agoYes, that is correct. But, this article was posted on Vice and then shared to hacker news. To its primary audience, this is mind blowing.
- Hnrobert42 6y agoGiven the other comments, this is not obvious to everyone.
- shrimpx 6y agoVice.com - get ready to get bombarded by popups and the website randomly jumping around while you’re trying to read a click-baity numbered list of trivial facts.
- yawnxyz 6y agoyeah, what happened to them? Are they going the way of Buzzfeed?
- prower 6y agoAs a comparison, how does Here Maps fare on the "creepiness scale"?
- joejohnson 6y agoIt appears they collect much of the same data, but likely less of it because of their smaller scale and inability to cross-tabulate this data with other user activity (like Google search): https://legal.here.com/en-gb/privacy/here-wego-here-application-or-here-maps-privacy-supplement-updated https://legal.here.com/en-gb/privacy/here-wego-here-applicat...
- Nextgrid 6y agoHere Maps has the Facebook SDK embedded in the app that pings Facebook upon every opening of the app (sending a persistent ID, IP address and device fingerprint including language, phone make/model and mobile carrier).
- joejohnson 6y agoThe last point (that there are alternatives but they’re all not as good) is why anti-trust action against Google/Alphabet can’t come soon enough. The acquisition of so many competitors should have been blocked by the FCC.
- aboringusername 6y agoTo be fair, most of the time users' are consenting to this. If you disregard the opportunity to read the privacy policy and just click "I agree", you really can't be too surprised at what information you allow these apps to access. I'd suspect mostly every human on earth is in some database somewhere, and that will become a normal facet of life. Even the second you're born a record is made, as well as the rough time of your death (I'd admit we can't exactly epoch that just yet, but maybe soon we'll have that level of accuracy).
- 0x_rs 6y agoNowadays you need to accept an EULA even just to open a OEM-provided Calculator application. Most people will - justifiably or not - ignore their actual content for they are meaningless to them and have never caused direct harm to most. Were I to spend time reading all the privacy policies and similiar legalese documents, I wouldn't get work done and be left with uncertainty either way, since most policies often cover more legal grounds and scenarii than those relevant and pertaining at the time, for convenience, too. More awareness that your consent is often given for dubious practices would maybe help, but that is not where a "privacy revolution" would begin.
- t0mas88 6y agoAt least Europe has made progress and prohibits the "it's in our 20 pages privacy statement" approach. The user must be explicitly informed and then provide consent. If it's unclear what you're consenting to, the consent isn't valid.
- aboringusername 6y agohttps://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement Yup. (Note: I went through an EU country in their region picker, went to sitemap and this is the URL I got).
- t0mas88 6y agoYou selected the US region according to the URL. But the point isn't that they can't have this privacy statement. The point is that it doesn't provide them the right to use your data.
- ffpip 6y agoTired of opening maps and getting a prompt to turn on 'make location bettter' every fuckingtime. Are the people working at Google that dumb? How many times do I have to decline. Other than that, the article is one of the most clickbaity one I've read
- prower 6y agoI suspect the "alright I accept just stop it!" approach is part of the design.
- stinos 6y agoAlmost definitely so. Like Youtube telling my epxerience will be 'better' if I login, each time again. But it won't (well, apart from me not to having to click the button each time). How low can you go as a company?
- izacus 6y agoWay way lower if you actually look at ISPs and media outlets like Vice. Did you see the amount of tracker shit that side loads up? They spray your private data not only to Google, but tens of other companies as well.
- teekert 6y agoMy annoyance gets bigger and bigger and I see myself more and more often saying, never mind! And being left with a bad feeling. Soon I will just stop clicking yt links and find alternatives.
- stinos 6y agosaying, never mind! Can always try to look for ways around first. Invidition (Firefox plugin to make use of Invidious automatically when seeing Youtube links) worked ok-ish for a while for me, lately less so.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
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- Mediterraneo10 6y agoOne of the most disappointing changes in Android recently is that any network-assisted geolocation plugins must now be installed as a system app, not a user app. That means that even if you use LineageOS where most Google stuff has been stripped out, getting a GPS fix through network assistance still sends data to Google servers. Only a tiny minority of users are comfortable working with the command line and will install e.g. Mozilla geolocation to the right place on disk. Just one of many changes Google has pushed into AOSP that end up strengthening its own monopoly.
- izacus 6y agoHmm, wouldn't in that case Lineage be able to preinstall such service themselves? I'd expect them to?
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoNo, the LineageOS devs say that their project does not aim to completely de-Google the OS, only remove Google Play Services and some Google applications like Maps. Thus, geolocation, DNS and login portal detection in LineageOS still use Google's servers.
- izacus 6y agoUgh, that's very disappointing then, I've always advised Lineage to people who wanted to deGoogle their phones :/
- submeta 6y agoI am about to delete Google Maps on my iPhone. Are all those issues valid on an iPhone as well or does Apple limit it‘s privacy evading features? Edit: Done. Deleted it. Now if only I had an alternative to Garmin Connect. Love my fitness watch (Garmin Fenix), but hate the way they collect data about me. And no alternative.
- kohtatsu 6y agoExplore the Privacy section of the Settingd app to find out.
- mnd999 6y agoI did this and I don't miss it. Apple Maps is good enough these days.
- izacus 6y agoApple Maps of course collects a lot of the exact same data (make sure you double check their settings. But you could always disable location history for Google Maps as well.)
- prepend 6y agoApple Maps doesn’t sell that data to advertisers. And they collect much less than Google.
- izacus 6y agoLast I checked Google didn't sell data to anyone either. I'm also interested in the claim that Apple Maps collects less data in this respect - they both report your current location for traffic analysis and have your day-to-day movement option available (the same that powers Find My Friends on iOS). Are you sure you're just not rationalizing Apples collection? It's kinda important to be realistic when it comes to privacy and not be mislead by loud marketing.
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- ecabuk 6y agoJust using GMail could help Google to find your approx. location 7/24. Your phone checking emails all the time, so google knows your ip.
- sdfhbdf 6y agoIPV4 geolocation is based on maintained databases (e.g. Ma Mind) that usually are city or street accurate. The popular rhetoric that having an IP is having the location is most often wrong unless Your users have static IPs registered to them. The way law enforcement does it is by subpoening the owner of the IP of pointing to the user associated with the IP at specific time but that still is prone to errors because of NATs - many distinct clients behind a single address. All in all fingerprinting is using IPs pretty rarely nowadays.
- tpmx 6y agoThe combination of occasional GPS/Wifi location data and continuous IP data is pretty powerful though.
- inquirerofsorts 6y agoThere's a setting hidden away in android allowing apps to scan local wifi/bluetooth networks even when wifi is turned "off". Enabled by default of course.
- rainingcatndogs 6y agoWhat settings is that?
- nstj 6y agoHow about all the data which map apps are asking for now (and in the past but for which they now have permissions): - WiFi network access (tightened up in recent mobile OS') which can give you a pretty accurate location - Photo roll (think of all that EXIF location data if you're giving photo roll access to leave images for reviews) - Calendar/location integration (who else is scheduled to go to that meeting on your calendar which you're directing yourself to via your maps app) - Bluetooth for all the BTLE beacons you're walking past in stores etc which have been gifted them for free from tracking companies I'm not taking a moral standpoint here on whether it's right to collect this data, just pointing out that there's an order of magnitude more than the article describes.
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- deostroll 6y agoIs there another way? This form of crowd sourcing data is how you are able to know when your next bus or train arrives. But what is the alternative? Should the concerned government body take it up? Your government releases a Maps application and asks citizens to use that...People are still going to have privacy concerns with that! Or we simply decide to wait for the next bus and not bother to know when it arrives. Go back to a laid back life? Many mortals think that is a good idea, and, that is OK. Like it or not, privacy is a problem of our civilization. Privacy problems are not going to go away. It up to the kingdom of humanity to live in good faith...But I have faith we might figure this out one day. Just not today...
- pizza234 6y ago> Or we simply decide to wait for the next bus and not bother to know when it arrives. Go back to a laid back life? Many mortals think that is a good idea, and, that is OK. I'm one of those mortals; my data connection is disabled on the phone and used only for emergencies (last time I've used it was months ago). Ultimately it fits in the big picture of the connected life. One can still live disconnected, and pay 10% of the "convenience price", but save 100% of the associated problems. I don't blame the connected lifestyle but the more I think about it, the more it looks like an addiction to me, and the big companies are capitalizing on it. I don't agree with them, but I can hardly blame them - it takes one tap to switch the connection off.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago> Is there another way? This form of crowd sourcing data is how you are able to know when your next bus or train arrives. A standard format for public transportation schedules exists, and many municipalities already provide that format to the public so that map-app developers can show public-transit details. So, people can find out when their next bus or train is going to arrive without giving up any of their own privacy.
- tedk-42 6y agoYour convenience at the expense of your privacy. I personally think it's great that I can lookup what I did two months ago thanks to Google services. I adblock and disable as much ad tracking as possible but I'm pretty happy with how useful google services are for my day to day errands. It reminds me of places I went two years ago that I couldn't remember without it. I find it strange people complain about it, yet still use their services. That's hypocrisy right there as well as a deeply unsettling conflict within. Everyone is entitled to make their choice of what phone they buy.
- Hnrobert42 6y agoThe complaint is that there are few viable alternatives. Whenever one does arise, Google or another tech behemoth buys it, eg Waze. Trust me, I am aware of the conflict. I hate Google with a passion, yet I still use some of their services. I feel sick doing it, but sometimes the convenience is worth my nausea.
- tedk-42 6y agoYour last statement reflects my post entirely. This contradiction is your problem, not Googles. They will continue to make money off you and me. The only difference is I don't get the nausea. Until you show me something REALLY dodgy they're are doing, I'll keep using their services. As I mentioned before, I'm aware they sell my behaviour as advertising data to companies. On my end I block as much advertising as possible so I find it's a useless strategy product teams pushing things onto me.
- octoberfranklin 6y ago> Everyone is entitled to make their choice of what phone they buy. Technology is becoming more capital-intensive MUCH more rapidly than the total amount of capital in the economy is growing. As a result, the economy can support fewer and fewer choices as time goes on. We're already at the point where there are only one-and-a-half companies selling LTE modem chips. All the good phones use Qualcomm's chips. The only other producer is Realtek, whose chips are only used in (AFAICT) extremely low-end phones sold only in developing countries. Qualcomm can backdoor your phone's modem chip with total impunity. Perhaps they already have.
- feralimal 6y agoIf this is a surprise to you, it shouldn't be. Phones (android or apple) are sugar-coated tracking devices. The point of them, is that they externalise the internal. They were planned to make your private information into a commodity. It also shouldn't be a surprised that no action will taken against them. Corporations are the government. Well, 'they' might even put up a show of pretence in "punishing" a corporation. But they will only do that once they know how they will achieve their plans anyway. And let's not forget that the media are corporations too - in their news shows, they will only present what's expedient. Its a sad story, but until a majority of people are on board with the idea that corporations/media/government are different sides of the same beast, nothing will change. Government is slavery. You are (or should be) your own master. Self-sovereignty is what you need. If you ever wonder why we think "anarchy is chaos", its because to the government, it is! But to me, its just the beginning.
- randomsearch 6y ago> They were planned to make your private information into a commodity. Are you seriously suggesting then when Apple launched the iPhone it was a plan to spy on you?
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoFor sure when Google launched Android it was a part of the plan.
- vntok 6y agoOf course. See iPhones having an active backdoor from the get go [1], NSA slides referring to Jobs as "Big Brother" and iPhone users as "zombies" [2], FSF's analysis of the iPhone and their conclusion that the iPhone is "exposing your whereabouts and providing ways for others to track you without your knowledge" [3], etc. etc. [1] http://www.cellphonedigest.net/news/2008/08/iphone_3g_has_a_kill_switch_co.php http://www.cellphonedigest.net/news/2008/08/iphone_3g_has_a_... [2] https://venturebeat.com/2013/09/09/nsa-calls-iphone-users-zombies-and-steve-jobs-big-brother/ https://venturebeat.com/2013/09/09/nsa-calls-iphone-users-zo... [3] https://news.softpedia.com/news/Apple-the-039-Warden-039-of-iPhone-Owners-89792.shtml https://news.softpedia.com/news/Apple-the-039-Warden-039-of-...
- nathias 6y agoSeems like the strategy "become the infrastructure, then exploit your position" never gets old.
- ishikawa 6y agoI personally don't mind about it. And also, credit card companies knew our location many years earlier. Technology benefits will come with this trade off.
- Hnrobert42 6y agoCredit card companies knew every time you used your card. Phones know every minute. Technology benefits do not have to come with this trade off. The article points to a number of ways it doesn’t like allowing offline access.
- shmapf 6y agoUnless I'm missing something, the article doesn't back up the claim in the title that "advertisers know where you are" at all.
- Hnrobert42 6y agoSee Venntel, A6, Six Gill, and High Noon. They definitely know where you are.
- c2xlZXB5Cg 6y agoI miss the times when they needed to trick you into installing spyware. We now have fullstack client and server side malware built-in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoI also miss the times when Microsoft asked us if we want to send them a bug report when an app crashed. Today they feel they can send all they want both ways.
- chopin 6y agoThat was the point where I retreated from Microsoft. Couldn't be happier.
- tabs_masterrace 6y agoThe number of government requests for user information is actually scary: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview So Google handed over info on 175k accounts in the last half of 2019 alone? It seems it's becoming common practice to routinely pull citizens data, without much of a warrant and without the target's knowledge. There used to be a thing called secrecy of correspondence, preventing governments from reading your letters. Now whenever your name lands on some clerk's desk, and he feels you might be hiding something, he just requests all your emails. This is all necessary because of "terrorist & child porn", but in reality we got mass surveillance. Next up gonna be social scores, it's like total authoritarianism in the making.
- izacus 6y agoNot only that, but here in Europe we've gotten laws lately where the ISPs and companies like Google are forced to retain data for just such requests. (This data retention is, of course, excluded from GDPR as well.)
- aboringusername 6y agoI don't actually consider that a problem, in fact, it's a feature and not a bug. You should assume your every interaction within the world is logged, your every tap, click, spoken and unspoken words. And act in accordance, there can a camera watching you, or a mic picking up your bigoted rant. You can (I love miley cyrus) add fake data to your posts, misdirect AI tools, and throw them off the scent if you wish. You give them the information you want to (you should probably use your own router, DNS, VPN, other tools). Dinosaurs are awesome. They can only store the data you're generating. Don't generate it? No data to access. I live in Mexico and love Donald Trump.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago> add fake data to your posts, misdirect AI tools This wastes your time and provides no value. Your fake data is insignificant noise compared to your real data signal.
- aminozuur 6y agoI personally don't care. My location data is anonimized anyway. And there are sensible reasons for why advertisers can target audiences by region/location. No advertiser can identify me personally. And if I must be shown ads, I choose relevant ads to the nonsense I saw 20 years ago (flashy banners saying I won $1M).
- deostroll 6y agoIt is easy to scapegoat privacy here. The case would more likely be we have signed up to some online service and information got leaked. Why else would a Nigerian prince be interested in you?
- Hnrobert42 6y agoIt is very much not anonymized. It is trivially easy (albeit not cheap - around $10k/month) to buy access to mobile ad id data, draw a polygon around your house, and get all the “anonymous” ids. From there, you can see all other locations of those ids. When they anonymize you, that just means they give you an is not linked to your phone number or account. It doesn’t mean someone can’t link it for you. The best defense to this is to reset your ad id regularly. Or on iPhones, turn off ad personalization. I don’t know about Android.
- aminozuur 6y agoGoogle does not sell my data.
- Hnrobert42 6y agoNo, but third party apps do.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoTargeting filters can be used to reverse engineer your data.
- beervirus 6y agoBut they do turn it over to the government.
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoThe place where I currently work assigned me a gmail address, and I wanted to check them on my phone. I was using k9 for my personal stuff, and wanted another app for the pro mails, so I pulled out the gmail app. Just one step before finalizing the setup process, I realized that google was asking me to accept Google Play terms of service. WTF? It turns out the gmail app setup process does much more, google takes over your entire phone, binding the omniscient google account to it, and all apps using google sdk, the calendar, maps, etc. I innocently wanted to check my work mails, and if I hadn't being cautious, I would have given my whole life to Google despite the fact I took great length to never do that (I don't have a personnal gmail/youtube account, I use an alternative app store, etc.) Sneaky, and scary. There is no way regular users notice that.
- tsjq 6y agoWoah ! That's scary
- hundchenkatze 6y agoI agree it's unfortunate you can't setup just one of their services. However, if you're not running a custom Android ROM that explicitly does not include any of Google's services then they could still collect whatever they want (from a technical perspective).
- rStar 6y agoAt least the doodles are fun though, right?
- rStar 6y agoIf one were to chart government requests against US population over the years, are we looking at exponential growth? If so, is google going to eventually just mirror it’s data for governments around the world? Will anyone care, even then? Perhaps google will collapse in on itself like a dying star before then, and then at least these processes won’t be so efficient.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoNo, not even close.
- burgertime 6y agoLet’s assume that it’s truly a tool of idealistic, well-intended, and purely beneficial capitalism with side effect of world brain intelligence used for private and public interests. It is still extreme power, like practical knowledge of nuclear fission. Popular understanding of the greatest risk of holding such power is the movie “The Social Dilemma”, which is hardly the equivalent of “War Games”. It briefly hugs itself sharing a vision of a world where technology doesn’t collect and manipulate. In the history of the market, have we ever accomplished that? We’re not on the sidelines. We continue to actively use hardware made by others on networks run by others to push more and more data to a plethora of centralized services, and even with P2P mesh networks that won’t stop. It’s Pandora’s Box. AI may end up killing or putting us in tubes like in The Matrix just to try to save us from ourselves. But if we try to stop it or slow it, we risk not finding cures for disease, dying from an asteroid or rogue black hole, not seeing more wonders of the universe, or not experiencing the 2049 holo equivalent to Brittany Spears in Toxic.
- reaperducer 6y agoIt's funny how much the world has changed in such a short time. A few nights ago I was watching the 2002 film The Bourne Identity. There's a line where one of the characters is horrified that the government knows she's traveling with someone else. "How can they know we're together?!" she shrieks. Today you just ask Google or Facebook, and it will tell you who's together, where, and for how long. And with a straight face they tell you it's a feature, not a bug.
- 02020202 6y agogoogle and facebook are CIA's and NSA's wet dreams coming true..i wish my wet dreams would come true as well.
- harry-wood 6y agoI can recommend OpenStreetMap alternatives mentioned at the end of the article. I'm not sure why it says they "still collect data". Pretty sure OsmAnd and Maps.ME are not collecting data in any surprising/evil ways (particularly as they can work entirely offline!) The article says they "just aren’t as good" which obviously isn't very specific, but if you live in an area where the map detail doesn't seem so good, then you're in luck. Adding details of your neighbourhood to OpenStreetMap is a lot of fun! Might seem like on odd way of looking at things, but seriously. You should try it. Contribute to a not-for-profit free and open map of the world!
- 43920 6y agoMaps.me at least still is collecting data; if you look at their privacy policy (https://legal.my.com/us/maps/privacy/ https://legal.my.com/us/maps/privacy/), they use your location data to “tailor and improve the adverts that are presented in the Services“. As far as I know, OsmAnd is fine, and there’s also a couple of alternatives: https://gurumaps.app/ https://gurumaps.app/ https://www.qwant.com/maps https://www.qwant.com/maps (Which can be installed as a PWA)
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoOsmAnd still uses Android's own built-in geolocation to get network-assisted GPS location, and that built-in geolocation defaults to Google’s servers. So, Google still knows where you are even if you use an OSM-based map app instead of Google Maps. Maps.me is an advertising-based business, and it is also controversial in the OSM community because it fails to properly credit OSM in violation of OSM’s license.
- jlkuester7 6y agoI am a big fan of Magic Earth. They offer the best combo I have found of usability/privacy-policy for a navigation app. https://www.magicearth.com/privacy/ https://www.magicearth.com/privacy/
- Kelamir 6y agoDoes removing Google-related apps(via ADB, for example) prevent one from being tracked by Google? For example, I've recently removed "Google Play Services" and much of Google stuff has disappeared. In settings of location, before I removed the app, it was mentioned that Google collects location data for something. Now it does not say so, with the app being gone. Does it mean Google no longer collects it, or is Google somehow app-independent, and there's no way of avoiding their grasp?
- propogandist 6y agoyou have to get a custom ROM, like lineageOS. The OS itself (and most of the stock apps) are calling home to Google constantly, depending on the phone manufacturer, it's likely calling home to them all the time too. You can use something like Netguard to get some idea of what's going off your device (if you're rooted AFWall). It's not perfect, but it's essential software in my opinion. You can see somethings that of that get through Netguard on PiHole, if you have it setup on your network. Removal of play services is one step, but pretty much every app on the phone from the stock keyboard ("Gboard") to all pre-installed apps call home. In the newer versions of Android, Gboard and other apps will complain every few seconds if/when Play Services is Disabled, as they don't get to send the telemetry and usage data to Google.
- andysch 6y agolineageOS is fine, though without play services | microG heaps of apps are broken.. I'd recommend switching to a non-AOSP based OS if you won't use those services, but if you stay on android you should definitely check iodéOS
- solinent 6y agoThey actually don't know where I am, I don't always bring a GPS tracker with me or keep it on me at all times like most. I also don't use Google services other than YouTube, so that helps as well.
- rezeroed 6y agoMy gps is always off unless lost. When I leave home all networking off, plane mode on.
- ir77 6y agoi dabbed into android when the pixel 2 came out, i wanted to see how much greener the grass was on the otherside after using iphone since the 4. two things i noticed beyond this "location history" that absolutely crepped me out - especially when it recorded a loop i took walking my toddler around our neighborhood at the time that was seriously better than any track that my garmin fenix could record of my runs: 1) simply asking the assistant : "call contact x" would say the assistant could not perform the task because it needed location history enabled -- why? it's in my contact list just execute the function! 2) simply asking the assistnat : "make alo call to contaxt x" would tell me the error above along with "google has not enabled that function yet". this was, at the time, the flagship of google and goole assistant couldn't even integrate with google's own apps? it's amazing to me how people here defend android and google and the insane amount of information that they're giving to this company all because they want to sideload an app onto their phone? i can do the same thing on my iphone, no, it's not as easy or as quick as "allow aps from unkown sources", but christ, think about what you're giving up.
- m1117 6y agoWhat's with sharing your data w/ google? Maps is a kick ass product. The article is creepy.
- djanogo 6y agoI was debugging some android battery issue in 2015, found that Google pushed new background service for upcoming Wear/Watch OS product. They literally pushed a scanning service to billions of devices through "Play Services" for a product which was barely available. Sold my android phone and switched to iOS. All these smart people they hire and amount of shit code in android is staggering. They never commit to fundamentally fix/rebuild basics, it's just library on top of library which need to distributed with every app to use basic stuff. (Why the hell is support library even a thing?, if they can push spying shit through google play services, they can push support libs too, and not have every app include it their builds). Kotlin because they screwed up with Java license, instead of building something ground up they take these ugly routes. Look at what Apple is doing x86-Arm, Swift in last 5/6 years?. Google is still hacking around on top of Java language/VM's after over 10 years.
- mancerayder 6y agoA really good reason for government regulation. If Google and its apps have become an almost essential utility, and if government authorities can request information just like that, seems like a good argument to be made that it's both a monopoly and a utility. Not sure how possible this will be with so much interplay between the DNC and Silicon Valley?
- FpUser 6y agoMy phone is not connected to the Internet and I use off OsmAnd offline for GPS navigation.
- sizzle 6y agoDoes gps on iphone also share data with advertising partners??