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There was nothing to stop any .exe from reading all your files and phoning home with them, which is even worse than Android. It was private insofar as your OEM

There was nothing to stop any .exe from reading all your files and phoning home with them, which is even worse than Android. It was private insofar as your OEM and all the third party developers whose products you downloaded were trustworthy, which is not too far off of Android. Lenovo was one of the more famous abusers of its freedom [0] so sticking with popular and well known consumer brands did not save you, just as I expect it doesn’t now with Android. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish

Tijdreiziger 4y ago
OK, we are talking about two separate forms of privacy here. You are talking about privacy from rogue app developers. I certainly laud Android (and iOS) for their approach here, and I agree that the situation is much better than on desktop operating systems. I, on the other hand, am talking about privacy from the OS developer, i.e. from tracking that's built-in to the OS by the OS developer. The situation on Android is certainly much worse here than any other operating system. (One could argue that the tracking is not built into the Android OS, but into Google's Play Services. Since all mainstream Android vendors ship Play Services, this is a distinction without difference.) It is possible to make an OS which is private in both senses. De-Googled Android distributions and Flatpak/Snap prove this. So far, there has been no mainstream interest in this, though.