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At that point you may as well implicate Apple, along with the rest of FAANG for being members of PRISM. According to their transparency reports, both Apple and

At that point you may as well implicate Apple, along with the rest of FAANG for being members of PRISM. According to their transparency reports, both Apple and Meta have an ~90% turnover rate for account details to US authorities. If you think it's "spyware" to comply with a legally valid subpeona then you're really not going to like your options. https://transparency.meta.com/reports/government-data-requests/country/US/ https://transparency.meta.com/reports/government-data-reques... https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html Ironically, Google actually comes out on top in this respect for continuing to maintain an Open Source OS you can actually use. Neither Meta nor Apple provide ways for a user to avoid their first-party user profiling to the same extent.

AndrewKemendo 2y ago
Yea Apple, AT&T, Verizon, Oracle etc…
Xelbair 2y ago
>At that point you may as well implicate Apple, along with the rest of FAANG for being members of PRISM. Of course, as they should be. lets not go so far ahead to call Android an "open" product, as flashing a custom rom is severely limited(both flashing, and your capabilities afterwards - for example you might run into issues with banking apps) - but at least you can read the source(without any guarantees that rom contents match it)
- talldayo 2y ago
  > lets not go so far ahead to call Android an "open" product Why not? When you use Android without Google services it makes perfect sense that some features break. The Play Store services won't work, which is bad but not critical for a smartphone. Pretty much every local feature Android has isn't broken by using a third-party ROM without Google services. I think it's perfectly fair to call Android an Open product, no less than Ubuntu is an Open product despite selling services to their users. > but at least you can read the source(without any guarantees that rom contents match it) There are multiple guarantees. You can build the ROM locally and flash it yourself if you're paranoid, the only parts you can't fully inspect is the firmware (which goes for most modern devices anyways). You can also match the official checksum provided by the ROM developer to verify that you're not being MITMed, decompress the ISO archive to inspect it before flashing, or use your Superuser privileges to inspect the root directory after installation. Android is uniquely open, and I don't think the existence of consequences for gutting Google services changes anything (for me, at least).

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

Yea Apple, AT&T, Verizon, Oracle etc…

Xelbair 2y ago

>At that point you may as well implicate Apple, along with the rest of FAANG for being members of PRISM. Of course, as they should be. lets not go so far ahead to call Android an "open" product, as flashing a custom rom is severely limited(both flashing, and your capabilities afterwards - for example you might run into issues with banking apps) - but at least you can read the source(without any guarantees that rom contents match it)

talldayo 2y ago
> lets not go so far ahead to call Android an "open" product Why not? When you use Android without Google services it makes perfect sense that some features break. The Play Store services won't work, which is bad but not critical for a smartphone. Pretty much every local feature Android has isn't broken by using a third-party ROM without Google services. I think it's perfectly fair to call Android an Open product, no less than Ubuntu is an Open product despite selling services to their users. > but at least you can read the source(without any guarantees that rom contents match it) There are multiple guarantees. You can build the ROM locally and flash it yourself if you're paranoid, the only parts you can't fully inspect is the firmware (which goes for most modern devices anyways). You can also match the official checksum provided by the ROM developer to verify that you're not being MITMed, decompress the ISO archive to inspect it before flashing, or use your Superuser privileges to inspect the root directory after installation. Android is uniquely open, and I don't think the existence of consequences for gutting Google services changes anything (for me, at least).