Here I am still waiting for my Purism Librem 5 I ordered in 2019 while google continues to suck up my data.
Any day now...
Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS
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Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS
#62Not mentioned in the headline: When the user is _not_ logged in, iOS collects "location" whereas Android does not. I am actually a little surprised that iOS would gather this information. What use would it serve?
It's possible this is referring to this feature: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/apple-explains-mysteriou... Generally speaking, Apple is drastically better about location services privacy. For instance, Apple Maps does not tie any location data nor direction requests to your Apple ID, and regularly rotates identifiers for devices used by the service: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212039
That link is returning "429 Too Many Requests." What feature is it you're referring to?
Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS
#63Last week my Pixel started to display an overlay with closed captions of the audio flowing through the device. It listens in on any audio and transcribes it. Probably handy for podcasts, but other things are just scary. Maybe it's OK if Google does it, I don't really know. I dislike it, it concerns me. The device would have a transcription of audio conversations I have through apps like WhatsApp. Or it could do somet…
When you enabled the Live Caption (similarly to how folks told you to disable it --- on my phone it was turned off by default) the following informational screen should have been displayed:
"Live Caption detects speech on your device and automatically generates captions.
When speech is captioned, this feature uses additional battery. All audio and captions are processed locally and never leave the device. Currently available in English only."
So note that Google does not get a copy of the audio stream. It stays local to your device only. I don't know about you, but seems like a really handy feature to me, especially for those who might have hearing difficulties.
Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS
#64As users, we are assured that telemetry is only for the purpose of "improving products and services", "improving user experience", etc. If one company is collecting 20x as much as another, all else being equal, one would expect that this would be reflected in the quality of the product/service/experience. Of course, Google's service is to advertisers, first and foremost. Users generally do not pay for what they recei…
If telemetry is used for improving services then why does every project who's UI decisions are based on telemetry[1] consistently rebuild their UIs in less usable and less user friendly ways?
[1] Pretty much anything from Mozilla or Google, Reddit, lots of others.
Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS
#65" Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways." -Google This is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doin…
The 30% cut was considered very good at the time. It was way better than the 50-90% cut that traditional publishers would take. A sibling comment notes that Steam charged 30% at the time (though some had better deals) but it's worth noting that Steam was not an open platform that anyone could publish on. Much like for consoles, to put a game on Steam you had to have a preexisting relationship with Valve, or try to de…
I can't help but feel like having it this way is breaking one of the huge reasons that made computers so absurdly exciting and enticing in the past.
The fact that there was this wide open field, where, sure, maybe you paid Microsoft for the OS, but then the rest was up to you. Trade shareware CDs, install stuff from the internet, type in code from a book or whatever, it felt like an infinite open field of possibilities.
I guess it's normal that the exciting frontier shifts around, but I really can't believe that it's somehow a good thing in this case.
Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 30% cut was considered very good at the time. It was way better than the 50-90% cut that traditional publishers would take. A sibling comment notes that Steam charged 30% at the time (though some had better deals) but it's worth noting that Steam was not an open platform that anyone could publish on. Much like for consoles, to put a game on Steam you had to have a preexisting relationship with Valve, or try to de…
The 30% cut was considered very good at the time. No, it wasn't. I'm not going to dig up links, but one could pop a web site storefront and Fastspring for payment processing (as one example of a company I used) for less than 10% (Fastspring would take something like 6-7%, IIRC). Discovery has always sucked on Apple's store, so no value-add there. In fact, I'd argue that the only value-add one gets out of Apple's stor…
IIRC 50% (60%) was the rate for the app distributor I used for selling my PalmOS app. It was digital download, too.
For the Apple case: access to the walled garden is the majority of the benefit. But still, setting up payments, customer service, chargebacks, fees, etc., is nice to have taken care of. 30% nice? Who knows. But more than just the raw payment processor overhead, surely.
AFAIK physical boxes are way above 50%.
Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS
#67This is precisely why I always choose to use the mobile version of a site/app rather than the app if it's available.
Safari has great adblocking. Also, the mobile version of a site is typically a superior UX compared to apps because the controls are consistent. It's usually faster, and best of all, it's MUCH easier to block all of the tracking.
Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible this is referring to this feature: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/apple-explains-mysteriou... Generally speaking, Apple is drastically better about location services privacy. For instance, Apple Maps does not tie any location data nor direction requests to your Apple ID, and regularly rotates identifiers for devices used by the service: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212039
That link is returning "429 Too Many Requests." What feature is it you're referring to?
There's an Ultra Wideband radio in the iPhone 11 and newer that isn't legal to use in all countries. Apple uses a location request sometimes just to determine if the device can legally run that radio or not.
Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS
#69Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS
#70" Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways." -Google This is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doin…
> It's similar to when Apple defended it's 30% store cut by claiming it's an "industry standard"... specifically, an industry standard that Apple established. I thought Apple chose that figure as game developers were already used to it from consoles and Steam.
It goes back much further than that—the mobile phone 'app' market was a lot worse (50%? And not a fun developer process) and was pretty poorly saturated by Java-based games and lightweight apps.
It all depends on what software / 'app' stores we're comparing to.