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?
I trust Google with my location.
I do not trust my banking app or the random photo filter I downloaded with my location.
What even is this post? You can’t understand the purpose of granular controls?
Your echo chamber must be nicer than the one they put me in. I bet you’re much more profitable to manipulate and justify the time and computational power to setup.
Manipulate? No need, I know the data that is collected and know what services I get in return. It’s a conscious choice.
Manipulate is the name of the game. It hasn’t been about banner ads since web 1.0. Your data shapes your search results for the web and shopping. Several places are setup to adjust price based on your data. They use categorization and seller promotion ambiguity to hide how they orchestrate their price fixing scam. You are paying more per item as a result of your profile, much the same as you are fed a specific stream of suggested content to influence your politics. Your lack of awareness, or caring begs the rhetorical question, why are you on Lemmy and posting comments in a privacy community when the largest and most pervasive privacy violating corporation in the world is something you don’t care about.
Where I live, it’s illegal to charge different prices to different customers. I pay exactly the same as anybody else, regardless of what settings I set on my Android phone.
Stop spewing nonsense.
It would be illegal to change the price directly, it is not illegal to obfuscate the product listing using a categorization system without any way to perform an absolute search of all possible listings. You are just shown listings based on obscure parallel categories. It is also legal to promote certain “sellers” of the same item. Therefore you are shown whatever price the “promoted” seller has picked. This stuff is obvious and easy to verify. Places like the USA have a tenth of the laws and protections of advanced nations. This is what right wing liberalism is all about. There are no protections against price fixing because the laws are written for the world of 100 years ago when the idea that a single item could come from a hundred angles and entities was an absurd impossibility. Maintaining laws at this primitive insufficient state is how billionaires are made. Every billionaire is a criminal exploiting loopholes and stealing from everyone. This is your trickle down economics. Everyone is at the top getting squeezed into the pockets of 750 parasitic criminal billionaires at the bottom. Data is used to manipulate you. It is done in a way that is just obscure enough for most people to fail to grasp. This shapes your entire life.
You do realize I don’t live in your country, right?
You do realize the country of the company is all that really matters and there are no real guarantees about internal data handling
Hahahah no. I mean, it was clear enough you have zero idea about what you’re talking about. But this comment now makes it extra clear.
Companies that provide local services need a local entity and follow local laws. Wonder why so many US companies comply with GDPR?
Google Brazil, while of course being tied to Alphabet, is a local entity that can be (and has been) taken to court, need to comply to local legislation, and so on.