Your phone is now a vending machine that charges you for the privilege of inserting coins. The product was never the phone.
Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
141–150 of 240 posts
Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
The paranoia is completely warranted, but there is a solution. Just root your Android phone and put a custom ROM like LineageOS etc If you want a stretch goal try and de-Google yourself, I have tried but failed twice now.
Re: de-Googling yourself: Goldman Sachs paid $6 million to try to get its [soon-to-be] former chief counsel Kathryn Ruemmler's Google search results highlighting her close friendship and many-years-long association with Jeffrey Epstein off the first few pages of results. Today, the first result on the first page of a Google search for her is the opening paragraph of her Wikipedia biography: >Kathryn H. Ruemmler (born…
I'm not sure what your point is.
Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
#143Think how bad the market got. Today we have preinstalled garbage apps like LinkedIn, garbage apps mandated to be preinstalled by the government, ads, cloud accounts, notifications spam, telemetry. This is not only Chinese smartphones, for example Samsung also plays this game. I assume there are Chinese backdoors, American backdoors and national government backdoors on almost every phone. And there seems to be no way…
Not sure what timescale you're referring to when you're talking about "how bad the market got" and "today", but back around 2012 I got my first and last Samsung smartphone, must have been a Galaxy 3 or something, that had all of those problematic things too. It seems like this starting to happen as soon as apps were installable on phones, even iPhones came (and still comes) with a ton of apps you cannot remove regard…
I can't remember if it was Samsung or something, but one of the providers shipped Android tablets with a custom-but-default keyboard which sent ALL your keystrokes back to the provider. That was a big nail in the Android coffin for me.
Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
My biggest obstacle to de-Googling is the GBoard keyboard of all things. There's really no good open source alternative that even comes close.
Have you tried the FUTO keyboard? I actually find I prefer it to gboard now. https://keyboard.futo.org/
I don't think I ever tried this one. I think I tried every keyboard on F-Droid but apparently FUTO isn't in the main F-Droid repo. I'm liking it so far. I'm a swipe typer and on most keyboards the swipe functionality is much worse than GBoard but this one seems to work pretty well. I'm going to try it for a while, thanks for the suggestion!
Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re: de-Googling yourself: Goldman Sachs paid $6 million to try to get its [soon-to-be] former chief counsel Kathryn Ruemmler's Google search results highlighting her close friendship and many-years-long association with Jeffrey Epstein off the first few pages of results. Today, the first result on the first page of a Google search for her is the opening paragraph of her Wikipedia biography: >Kathryn H. Ruemmler (born…
I'm not sure what your point is.
Wrote tomaytotomato 3 hours ago:
>If you want a stretch goal try and de-Google yourself, I have tried but failed twice now.
My point is that even with unlimited resources it's impossible to de-Google yourself.
Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Easier said than done in the US. Even of the phones that allow for rooting (which is few and far between these days) you're at the complete mercy of the carrier for whether or not that ability is actually available to you. Even if the gracious lords may allow it, you have to engage in a long and drawn out Byzantine rite just for the privilege. Currently sitting on a Pixel 10 that will not let me have root. Give me a…
> Currently sitting on a Pixel 10 that will not let me have root. Stop buying phones from Verizon?
Not a Verizon phone.
Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
The paranoia is completely warranted, but there is a solution. Just root your Android phone and put a custom ROM like LineageOS etc If you want a stretch goal try and de-Google yourself, I have tried but failed twice now.
My biggest obstacle to de-Googling is the GBoard keyboard of all things. There's really no good open source alternative that even comes close.
I do not type a lot on the phone (I own a laptop), so no worries.
Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
#148Isnt Motorola basically a ‘Shanzhai’ (copy cat) brand now? Some dude putting the logo on some OEM parts? I am thinking of that Commodore phone from a while back and others. While completely speculative, it is interesting to see legit brands go Shanzhai or get Shanzhaied and Shanzhai brands go legit (xiaomi, huawei)
Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
#149Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who outside Apple/Google/Fairphone isn't? Samsung has been shipping the Israeli (IronSource) AppCloud on A series for a while now and people in some regions even spotted it on S-series phones (it'll spy on your usage and install apps). Nothing, which uses clean Android as one of their selling points, started installing something similar (AppServices, presumably also from IronSource given the Aura branding) on various…
OneDrive on some Samsung phones recently started uploading user photos on their own, despite user never granting apps the permission to do so: https://www.reddit.com/r/samsunggalaxy/comments/1t7vqr8/why_... I am getting tired of all these nonsense. At this point, Samsung may be shipping more malware than anyone else on phones
Some 7 months ago there was this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45551504 (Microsoft's OneDrive Begins Testing Face-Recognizing AI for Photos (for Some Preview Users)).
I haven't noticed any further links regarding this topic. Thus I have no idea if setting was fully implemented or abandoned but with this thread here you linked, but I'd rather guess they're full after user's data. And from what users wrote there, MS is not even doing this with some elaborated darkpatterns scenarios but just ordinary stealing these photos. This should be announced louder.