this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2021
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Privacy
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Do you know that spying happens exactly trough Google services? You cannot have any expectation of privacy with Google services installed. Google has monopolized spying on Android by restricting APIs that can be used to spy on users (wifi/bt scans, filesystem, background processing).
Yes I am fully aware... but the context of comparing it to Apple is key here.
I saw that. I think its unreasonable to argue in favor of Google despite Apple being disastrous. The only privacy conscious option I see for smartphone usage is LineageOS without Gapps + FDroid or /e/ for less tech savvy people. Lots of tracking happens trough WiFi/BT mapping and that means you have to get rid of problematic pieces of SW stack at a pretty low level: Gapps and ditching iPhone completley.
Do you know how much data Apple spies on? That recent 20x report was twisted by the Apple fanboy/paid outlets to badmouth Android, when if you read the report, it was Apple that spied much more identifiers.
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
https://teddit.net/r/privatelife/comments/mh9gt3/ Read the top stickied comment, I sourced it from another person who debunked the Apple fanboy twist
yeah I've seen this research, and again I'm in no way defending Apple's user abuse. You say that Apple spies much more identifiers which is true as per paper but is true only while using device without touching Play services. It's measuring spying activity only in idle/startup mode of operation. I kinda doubt Google doesn't use WiFi MAC address of phone for social/location mining. Paper doesn't mention anything about what kind of spying happens when you start using your phone as a typical user would: mail, web, maps, YT.
The thing is, you can degoogle/detelemetry any Android device with my known smartphone guide, without root, and any Android 9+ device fully. (Android 7/8 can be hard to do and should not be used as daily driver anyway now.)
Can you do that with Apple device? No.
I agree with you fully on that front. I just think we should demand more than just some settings options.
The answer to that, according to Apple fanboys is, do not buy Apple. That speaks volumes about Apple users and their care for privacy, security and anonymity rights.