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"I'm profoundly uncomfortable with essentially condemning those that can't afford it to having to surrender their rights to privacy." You appear to be implying
by DCKing 13y ago
"I'm profoundly uncomfortable with essentially condemning those that can't afford it to having to surrender their rights to privacy."
You appear to be implying that you can get extra privacy by buying a more expensive phone. However, the Moto G does not actually seem to be any more or any less invading of privacy compared to any other Android phone out there (and arguably not moreso even compared to Windows Phones and iPhones). Even if those phones are much more expensive than it.
Furthermore, the inevitable popularity of the Moto G only means that you will be able to load it with a custom ROM that gives you as much control as you want, like Cyanogenmod/OmniROM without Google apps.
Google rightly gets flak for privacy issues, but I think you're going too far by getting the privacy debate into hardware pricing as well.
- fidotron 13y agoOK, I admit it's not a perfect viewpoint, but I don't think any is! The problem here is these things should be private by default, with the option to break from that, since installing things like Cyanogenmod have external dependencies (like PCs) that cost money and people may not have access to. Features such as weather forecast widgets should not break if you choose not to share your location with Google, and right now many will. Further, I think Google are monopolising areas such as push email to such a degree they should be forced, MS in EU style, to give you a choice of accounts you can use to access things on the device when first started up. For example, there is no technical reason you couldn't use your twitter (or any OAuth) account as your ID, even when accessing Google services like the Play Store, but they are using all this to weasel Google+ in everywhere.
- nl 13y agoFeatures such as weather forecast widgets should not break if you choose not to share your location with Google, and right now many will. I (and I think most people) like their weather forecast to show where they actually are? Using geo-location makes it simpler for users, which I think is a good thing, isn't it?
- fidotron 13y agoHave you heard of GPS? It's pretty good.
- nl 13y agoSo many ways to answer that... Have you heard of GPS to POI? How do you think Google gets your location when you look up the weather (and see later for a discussion of network location vs GPS location)? Your GPS location is useful, but you need to convert it to a named location to get the weather. There are some services that do that for you.. but then you need to send your location - which seems to be what you want to avoid? Of course, for most weather-type services, "network location" rather than GPS location gives sufficient precision. With that you still need to convert that to a POI, though.
- acchow 13y ago> Your GPS location is useful, but you need to convert it to a named location to get the weather. Why would any app need a named location? Seems trying to match a string is way harder than finding the nearest weather data by coordinates...
- nl 13y agoIn those cases, doesn't querying by location sharing your location?
- sharpneli 13y agoUnless all the weather data from pretty much everywhere is streamed constantly to your phone. Then you can do the query by location effectively offline.
- fidotron 13y agoGoogle aren't providing the weather APIs. The problem is using Google Play Services for location instead of GPS (the satellites).