211–220 of 348 posts
It used to be "don't be evil". Now its "hide, deny and obsfucate our evil".
I think a more useful life lesson is that an organization's motto is not a useful measure of its true internal or external ethics - regardless of what it says - regardless of the type of organization. A motto is, by definition, marketing. Even more generally, I worry about the trend on social media to value words so much more than actions.
Culture is what you do.
If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. Few years back you could easily root your android device and get custom ROM installed. Now, only solution is use a feature phone without gps and wifi and have a separate device for connecting to internet. IPhone is also a good alternative but I don't agree with thier walled garden development philosophy. Edit: You pay a separate fee…
I've had a string of Google phones going back to the Nexus 5x but, for the very reasons laid out in this article, my next phone will likely be from Apple. That will be my first Apple product.
get a pinephone if you value freedom and privacy. apple ios is just as bad as android or microsoft windows
It’s a hobby project as of yet (as even mentioned on the website). Hopefully once software matures there will come a pinephone 2 that will pack a more modern hardware and have full android app compatibility (there is no way around it, it is needed) that can be actually used as a daily driver.
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> If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. Full price TVs from eg. Samsung comes with ads and spyware nowadays. I would say the saying has stopped being accurate. Also, phones are paid for.
TVs are so cheap now because of ad subsidies. That 42” panel wouldn’t cost $199 if it weren’t for ads.
The same surveillance capitalism runs on a multi-thousand dollar OLED panel.
There’s a huge privacy battle on the horizon in tech. The initial scuffles are just the beginning. Google and Facebook’s business models depend deeply on being able to track information that consumers are increasingly unhappy to share. Both companies attempts to diversify their dependency on such info for their revenue have been broadly unsuccessful (Google fiber or a Google car anyone?). Meanwhile the likes of Apple…
I think in the future in order to stay private online, there's no way unless web traffic is decentralized off their servers. That is the real power behind a peer-to-peer system in my opinion: Offloading, and therefore removing the capabilities to track anything as a single node in the system. The only issue is peer-to-peer transport encryption, which can be solved if done correctly. Something like "statistically corr…
It used to be "don't be evil". Now its "hide, deny and obsfucate our evil".
I've internalised the adage "Don’t listen to what people/corporations say, watch what they do" and found it very useful to see through these fancy statements. It's especially useful at workplace to observe what people do and understand the politics. And at a different level observing how Google was acting more evil by the day made me completely switch over to the Apple ecosystem.
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DuckDuckGo have said that they make less money, because they use only the search term not other data/tracking. But they still make money.
Big companies have "fiduciary duty" to do the thing that gets them the most money within legal bounds, and not the ethically right thing. As in, they have a duty to breach ethics for profit as long as it's legal. Stupid concept which I wish we could abolish but that's the way the economy is currently setup.
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> From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much Which research? From my experience, personalized ads perform ~50% better than non-personalized ads. This would also explain why Google and Facebook are fighting tooth and nail to keep their tracking infrastructure.
Location targeting isn’t effective. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.118... Google are fighting tooth and nail to protect the illusion that their ads work.
Try turning on a VPN from another country, opening an incognito window and doing a google search for 'pizza'.
See how the results are nearly useless...? A bunch of delivery services that don't deliver in your country, who want payment in a currency you don't have, and all written in a language you don't speak.
Location at the local level matters less, but even so it makes some search results substantially more useful. That is a benefit that other search providers (who don't have strong control of the browser/platform) will not have. It makes the moat bigger.
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I've considered switching to iPhone many many times mostly just for iMessage and Facetime. Every time I change my mind after just a few minutes of considering what switching to iOS entails.
Yeah, I am not a huge fan of company lock-in. Apple makes their money on hardware, so they try really hard to keep people locked in [1]. "c. However, Craig Federighi, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering and the executive in charge of iOS, feared that "iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones". (PX407, at '122.)" Yeah, Apple do…
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Apple may protect you from Google and Facebook but it won't protect you from itself. iOS is completely closed and you can't verify if it respects your privacy. Don't trust Apple. Open source software is a fundamental requirement for privacy. GrapheneOS is one of the best alternatives.
Which phone do you recommend going with it?
https://grapheneos.org/releases
All Google Pixel phones released to date receive vendor security updates for 3 years after the release date: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705
A Pixel 4a ($349 new) would cover you until August 2023, and a Pixel 4a (5G) ($499 new) would cover you until November 2023 with better performance. The Pixel 5 is not a particularly good value for the price. Used Pixel 3, 3a, and 4 devices (along with their XL counterparts) are less expensive options with vendor support timeframes that expire sooner. The Pixel 3 and 4 (non-XL) models have poor battery life, so choose an XL model if you opt for either of those.