131–140 of 320 posts
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Maps with live traffic is going to be the tough one; at least it is for me.
This would have been a dealbreaker for me, but now that my company has permanent WFH, live traffic is much more of a would-be-nice.
Kind of weird they decided to test with a 4 year old Samsung phone but I guess its popular. I'm curious about the exact breakdown of data. How much of this is because it was a brand new phone?
It wasnt as much as alluded to in the complaint, but essentially many apps that you may not suspect, including messaging, send small amount of data to Google whether on Wifi or Mobile data. Power users can always disable it, but would not have known until you see the complaint like this.
One more thing: While the system apps do take up, even the apps which do not have permission to run in background use some amount of data. I have apps like amazon prime, Dominos, etc. which I have not opened in months (and restricted background activity) and yet they used some amount of data. If one good thing comes out of this, maybe they should restrict background activity until explicitly specified. (I do understand some of them would be for showing push notifications, but that can be handled differently)
> Under active use, Android devices transfer about 11.6MB of data to Google servers daily, or 350MB per month, it's claimed, which is about half the amount transferred by an iPhone. Interesting, so 350MB of data per month is abuse, iPhones 175MB per month isn't. I guess Google now has to half their data use for it to be at parity with Apple and we're all fine?
That’s not saying 175MB per month is ok, that could also be problematic. It’s saying 350MB per month is clearly excessive as demonstrated by a company using half that.
What I want now is an open source Android device where I have controls.
The #1 things I want to control is app permissions. I should be able to shut them down. If an app "needs" my location, it should get a random spot in the world. If it "needs" my contacts, it should get an empty list. If an app "needs" my network, it should see that it's offline.
The #2 thing I want to control is data going out.
#3 is having security updates forever, rather than sudden EOL with no notice.
I think someone should fork Android and do that. Ironically, I think several Chinese companies are well-positioned to do that, from a market perspective, but not from a cultural perspective.
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Supposedly, a device requires an OS (such as Windows Mobile), which supposedly costs money, and does not have telemetry. Microsoft added telemetry to Windows because it is lucrative (up to the point they were giving Windows 10 away). To get rid of that, what we need is legislation, and then hold these corporations such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple accountable.
I've been trying out various FOSS operating systems for the Pinephone lately. Mobian seems to be in a pretty usable state right now. I really think FOSS is the only way forward. Despite their marketing efforts, Microsoft is still the awful evil company its always been.
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Those are the dumbed down options for plain users. Power users just disable the Telemetry service. Start > Run > services.msc. Right-click on "Collected User Experiences and Telemetry". Stop the service and change startup-type to Disabled. Or you can use windows group policy editor. (which every IT department uses) Start > Run > gpedit.msc Computer Configuration> Administrative Templates> Windows Components> Data col…
And then next time Windows is updated it re-enables all of that garbage.
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Whether or not google are "stealing" data allowance from customers, or acquiring this right voluntarily/contractually from customers is interesting in the abstract Specific example of harm: international roaming data fees are outrageous and even a small use of data can stack up. If I visit Canada using my UK mobile phone, I have to be sure to keep data roaming turned off because I get dinged for £6/Mb (about US $7.50…
FWIW, both Vodafone and EE offer good deals for Canada roaming. EE includes Canada roaming in many of their plans (or its £10/month extra to add it). Vodafone also includes it in some of their plans or it's £6/day if not.
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I’m working on the same thing and the phone at the moment. I doubt I’ll be able to go cold turkey so I’m blowing one app away every two weeks until I don’t need it any more. It’s not as hard as it felt like it was going to be.
Maps with live traffic is going to be the tough one; at least it is for me.
Good that the root cause is being addressed. In the meantime, I'll be reducing the symptoms by routing all my DNS traffic through my pi.hole instance.
How are you routing through your pihole when connected only to mobile broadband?
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You should sign up with three. In Europe + about 30 other countries I get to use my allowance as normal when overseas
3 doesn't have free roaming in Canada. They do in US but not Canada.