I’m talking about things like approximate location, file/album specific media access, system wide camera and mic access, camera/mic use indicator, permission logs, data safety page for apps in play store etc.
Who are they trying to fool here? Any person who is truly aware about privacy knows Google cannot trusted in this domain. I don’t believe Google just decided to turn ‘not evil’ in one night and bring all these additions that actually have any impact on us end users. Google might just as well have the same access to our devices’ data if not more and they wouldn’t mind letting third party apps have access to it. Operating at such a humongous scale globally, being the lifeline of nearly all individuals and industries and predating off them as their primary source of revenue, they have complete power to ignore or silence the privacy minded individuals like us, yet they bothered to implement and provide us these features.
I cannot come up with any reasonable answer for this apart from what I think of this as some sort of publicity stunt to compare themselves with the privacy features Apple introduced in their softwares. What are your thoughts?
Apple tracks all of my data on their own. I know this, and do what I can to limit it.
I still have control over what the apps have access to. For example, only a handful of apps have access to my cellular data. Nothing else needs it, and I am prompted when I launch an app to change the setting if I want to. This prevents them from doing anything unless I’m on Wi-Fi. Same with location, I have it enabled for 4 apps, and get notifications frequently that I can change my settings.
Sure, I have to trust them that they aren’t sharing that data even when I ask them not to, but given apple’s track record, I’m reasonably comfortable with this until a Linux phone is good as a daily driver.
It’s the same thing. And frankly they are probably just playing catch-up to what apple already does.
If you trust google with that info, you should trust them not to share it when they say they won’t. If you don’t trust them with it, you need to get off android, because they have it anyway.