Google collects metadata from Android phones

This is completely fucking ridiculous.

Of course Google's privacy policy says they can store that information. That's why I can go to google.com/voice and get a comprehensive, time-ordered, millisecond-precision (if you poke around the network tab a bit - I forgot that epoch values started "12" back then!) list of

> your phone number, calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information and types of calls.

that I have made over the past 6 years, 10 months, and 20-something days.

This is a service they provided, that I'm using, if the data were not there, I would have gotten rid of my gvoice number, found a service that preserved my data like any self-respecting service provider (I'm really at a loss here - is this not available on iOS?) and complained loudly that Google Caused Data Loss For Users and should probably get hit with a lawsuit for damages.

I cannot believe how one-sided the discussion here is.

The claim that GOOG is capturing all this data on all calls and texts on all android devices is -completely- unsubstantiated. There's one link to a german-language blog, whose (admittedly, Google-) translated claim seems to be that they tested - a - phone. One. With phone calls. Did they test SMS too? Was there a network connection to google's servers? The omission could just be the translation, but right now I think this is actually a story with 181 comments about, at most, a phone that also has hangouts, that pings the server to tell google to mark their user as being in a call.

Completely ridiculous.

My only affiliation with Google is as a user.

Oh, and let's not forget here, that if Google were trying to subtly reinterpret "your use of our services" as "we capture everything from all Android devices", why on earth would they do a time-synchronized, easily-reproducible log when the call starts? (And how would they already have the call duration, blah blah blah at that time?) I can assure you, they're quite familiar with queuing data on the device to be sent later.

The most irritating comment thread I've read in a long time. None of what is being claimed is even remotely cogent, on the face of it, and the reaction is just an endless woe-is-me of "what did you expect, we all saw this coming, what can ya do, the companies these days, they're just not like they used to be" I mean, is this a brexit hangover or what?

Just sprinkle on a little "the NSA does exactly thing tho omg" and "metadata===murder" (yup, I think of you as js fanboys, that's how bad it is) just and... yeah, the expletive is necessary. Completely fucking ridiculous.

Even the opt-out seems backwards. I checked the setting, immediately saw that the button was disabled and thought, "Oh, I'm good." Until I read the description and thought about it. The switch needs to be "on" to opt-out. http://imgur.com/ZZTL3ct

Important to note is that it also says "...if you clear your cache, you will lose your opt-out setting." What cache?

No shit

Yes, it doesn't appear users have any explicit rights under the policy.

This is a very good reply. My hat off to you.

That being said, could you give us a good example for these privacy-enabled phones and apps? I am willing to make a collection out of these and write a guide on hardening Android. And I am not just talking apps that are incredibly hard to use; I mean the better generation of them who are actually mass-audience-friendly.

Of course we must not forget that Android phones could have a backdoor at the kernel or even at the hardware level. But I still think we should do the best that we can. As many security researches say, you aren't absolutely breach-proof, but if you work hard enough you're not a target that's worth the effort, especially having in mind you're not a legitimate threat to any government.

I view this sort of like the people who got away from the Matrix in the movies; as the Architect and the Oracle implied, as long as these people aren't an escalating threat for the entire system, they're allowed to live however they choose.

What's your opinion on the Turing Phone and Sailfish OS in general, by the way? Do you think that it gives us a fair progress in the direction of the more snoop-proof end-user tech?