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I heard that argument a lot, but I still don't quite get it. If you have (stock) Android, then Google has root on your phone. They don't need to hide loopholes

by xg15 5y ago

I heard that argument a lot, but I still don't quite get it. If you have (stock) Android, then Google has root on your phone. They don't need to hide loopholes for themselves inside the permission system, because they are not bound by it anyway. Or did I miss something? I think you are still right that the permissions are way too coarse-grained or have weird associations. But it seems to me, they at least partially improved the situation by switching to an ask-on-first-use model. Of course it might still be that Google is keeping the permissions deliberately coarse to secretly help third parties with data mining. That would be sort of the same spirit as the whole "privacy sandbox" stuff.

zibzab 5y ago
As a user, you can decide to never enable GPS. This scheme forces you to enable it for reasons completely unrelated to your usage.
- xg15 5y ago
  This is true - but my point was that this doesn't influece Google's ability to track your location in the slightest. Google could design the most privacy-conscious, user friendly permission system, make it super easy to disable location without any side effects - and still have the OS or Google Play Services or whatever else completely ignore the setting and track you anyway.
- hulitu 5y ago
  > As a user, you can decide to never enable GPS. As a user you can decide this if you never use programms which need access to location, navigation programs, for example. If you look a bit further you will notice that there are a lot of google programs which have access to location like Google play games or google play music or messages etc. There are also some "system" programs for which you cannot disable location access.
wzdd 5y ago
A loophole is useful in the scenario that Google wants the good PR of being seen as as privacy-focused by restricting location tracking, even to itself, but still wants to collect as much location data as it can. That said, I don't believe this is what's happening for the headphone pairing case. It's easier and likely more fruitful to limit functionality of popular apps unless fine grained location and is enabled and you are logged in to your Google account, which is what I believe they do with Maps.
- xg15 5y ago
  Well ok, from a psychological standpoint it could make sense: Google can shape the available choices in such a way that requesting has immediate negative effects on your user experience with the device - and then Google can claim that users actually don't want any privacy.

by xg15 5y ago

zibzab 5y ago

As a user, you can decide to never enable GPS. This scheme forces you to enable it for reasons completely unrelated to your usage.

xg15 5y ago
This is true - but my point was that this doesn't influece Google's ability to track your location in the slightest. Google could design the most privacy-conscious, user friendly permission system, make it super easy to disable location without any side effects - and still have the OS or Google Play Services or whatever else completely ignore the setting and track you anyway.
hulitu 5y ago
> As a user, you can decide to never enable GPS. As a user you can decide this if you never use programms which need access to location, navigation programs, for example. If you look a bit further you will notice that there are a lot of google programs which have access to location like Google play games or google play music or messages etc. There are also some "system" programs for which you cannot disable location access.

wzdd 5y ago

A loophole is useful in the scenario that Google wants the good PR of being seen as as privacy-focused by restricting location tracking, even to itself, but still wants to collect as much location data as it can. That said, I don't believe this is what's happening for the headphone pairing case. It's easier and likely more fruitful to limit functionality of popular apps unless fine grained location and is enabled and you are logged in to your Google account, which is what I believe they do with Maps.

xg15 5y ago
Well ok, from a psychological standpoint it could make sense: Google can shape the available choices in such a way that requesting has immediate negative effects on your user experience with the device - and then Google can claim that users actually don't want any privacy.