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Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

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Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#261

Post by bsharitt »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #235
lanfeust6 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ordered my Pinephone this month and patiently awaiting it. Despite what may currently be lacking, it's in a good enough place to be a daily driver for myself. My Blackberry Q10 served me well for years but the battery is starting to go and the OS + apps are no longer supported. I can actually say I've skipped Android/iOS entirely.

You're saying the PinePhone is a daily driver before you've tried it? I just got mine and it is significantly buggier, crashier, and slower than expected. The USB C port is also of low quality. It is overall worse quality than expected.

Yeah, I was excited to try to daily drive a Pinephone expecting it to be "a bit buggier" that a regular phone, but it's still a long way to go once I got it.

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#262

Post by pessimizer »

lenkite wrote: post #105
yakireev wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? It's the opposite of this, in Windows 10 telemetry can not be disabled at all. All you get is a choice between "Basic" / "Enhanced" / "Full (recommended)" modes.

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…

> Now, please do educate me on how to disable telemetry on MacOS Big Sur without third party software.

There's no lower bar that you could set.

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#263

Post by pessimizer »

swebs wrote: post #57
indymike wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows mobile wasn't going to change the world. That said, I'd love to see a real alternative to iOS and Android if for no reason than my phone is a very powerful, very real computer and I can't use it as such.

There are full Linux distros for phones nowadays. They're still in alpha stages, but they're getting better all the time https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Software_Releases

But that's been true for at least 15 years. It's still very difficult to get a reliable, usable Linux phone, and betting on one being right around the corner has been a long term bad bet. I say that as someone who still uses an N900. Can't wait until I can get Nemo on a reasonably priced modern phone.

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#264

Post by megablast »

generalizations wrote: post #120
qz2 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are being tracked by your car. Better get rid of that.

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#265

Post by throwaway567834 »

shostack wrote: post #209
throwaway567834 wrote: post #195

They are really going to shit themselves when they learn the technical details of what is being uploaded. Hint: Google Location Services's "telemetry" is just that: extremely detailed logs of location information that though "anonymized" absolutely obliterates privacy and will in itself be a major scandal.

If it is properly anonymized, how does it obliterate privacy? What data specifically would do that which is not anonymized?

Do you think a GPS trace accurate to the meter and an accelerometer trace accurate enough to count footsteps combined with WiFi signals and barometeric data accurate enough to locate the room and floor of any building is going to be properly anonymized by a randomly generated UID that expires after 7 days?

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#266

Post by goatsi »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #260
mappu wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a massive wave of phones being sold with unlocked bootloaders with preinstalled malware. How do you stop this? Unscrupulous retailers would buy thousands of your latest phone, root it and sell it for $1 less than MSRP, and make much more than that from injecting extra ads and stealing data. Not to mention, all the bad press "you" get for "shipping a phone with ads in it". Mere tamper-evidence - having a "bo…

How about let adults wreck the phone they bought if they 'want' to. Bootloader unlock in a 'hidden' power-on menu is sufficient. If you really want to baby users just have this set a flag that requires a click box to be ticked on next boot in order to actually unlock it (eg "you selected to unlock your bootloader in the power-on menu; unlocking your bootloader may lead to you destroying your phone, do you want to con…

>The "we're protecting people from themselves" argument seems spurious.

Because it isn't the argument at all? The goal is to protect your reputation from having malware and ad laced versions of your latest hardware flooding the market (and hitting the news). Users are just a secondary concern.

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#267

Post by Retric »

ggggtez wrote: post #254
Retric wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could you imagine a class action lawsuit for not removing null characters at the end of strings in order to save bandwidth? A 2x multiplier barely reaches the level of noteworthy. I look forward to my $12 class action payout, but let's be honest, this isn't going anywhere, and would almost certainly be a bad precedent. Legally requiring premature optimization would be the real world result of a ruling in favor of the…

We aren’t talking about premature optimization, we are talking about Google forcing customers to pay to be spied on. Assuming there are ~100 million Android phones in the US and this is costing individual consumers ~10$/year that adds up to 1 billion dollars per year across the US.

Which seems like the point of class action lawsuits and far more significant than most of them.

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#268

Post by megablast »

heavyset_go wrote: post #236
nitrogen wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I want is a Maemo-based phone, with at least 20% marketshare and an Android compat layer so there is an ecosystem to support it, and the same camera as any other flagship level phone.

Maemo was great, and so was WebOS in the Pre days. App distribution was also better on both platforms. Maemo used apt under the hood, and Preware[1] was phenomenal. These days the two vendors that own 99.4% of the mobile OS market[2] don't want to let you install apps unless they can get a 30% cut. [1] https://webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-hel…

> don't want to let you install apps unless they can get a 30% cut.

They both allow free apps.

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#269

Post by djeiasbsbo »

lanfeust6 wrote: post #190
luord wrote: post #93

Between this and Jeffrey Paul's article shared yesterday about Big Sur and Apple Silicon[1], it's becoming increasingly tempting to throw my phone away and keep using only Linux with no applications primarily developed by these giants (i.e. no Chromium, etc). Supporting initiatives like the Librem phone is also moving up in my list of priorities, once I get enough money to spare at least. [1]: https://news.ycombinato…

I ordered my Pinephone this month and patiently awaiting it. Despite what may currently be lacking, it's in a good enough place to be a daily driver for myself. My Blackberry Q10 served me well for years but the battery is starting to go and the OS + apps are no longer supported. I can actually say I've skipped Android/iOS entirely.

I have had the PinePhone devkit for a long time now and while I am very invested in the project and like to see this optimism, I can tell you that it's definitely not ready to be a daily driver yet.

It's coming along fine though and in a few years that might be true! For now, a great device for tinkering and contributing back.

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#270

Post by djeiasbsbo »

dimator wrote: post #176
smt88 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about LineageOS with a non-Google app store?

I've been trying this, and let me tell you, the user experience is absolutely terrible. The Play store and what it gives you is incredibly hard to live without, unless you really just want to use your phone for texting, browsing, and calling. If you're a minimalist, then great. If you're accustomed to what a smartphone can do, not so great. The alternative app stores are full of unimpressive, small scale apps. Dozens…

I am using a pretty much "degoogled" android with microG as a replacement for the play services and a patched google play store that works with it. So the play store is basically the only google bit that ocassionally runs on my device.

And let me tell you, I almost never have to open up the playstore except for updating my banking apps, because f-droid has a much better selection of apps anyway.

For example, NewPipe is a much superior alternative to the official youtube app and it even works perfectly fine without a youtube account. I don't have to ever worry about having my google account deleted because NewPipe backs up my subscriptions to xml.

I can only recommend this approach of "degoogling" but still having the ability to fall back in case it is really needed. But so far microG has been great, they even implemented the Covid Exposure Notification framework very quickly.

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