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?

  • j4k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    10 months ago

    Google is getting sued for antitrust. Probably has to do with this.

    There is a ton of ambiguity about privacy because of how android is setup. In order to make it idiot-user-friendly, android has a 3 user permissions system. It is different than Linux. The 3rd party developer has a place in the permissions space. You are not root and the developer has a similar input as the end user as far as permissions and basically Google is root (or AOSP if you do not have the proprietary google services framework installed). This is one reason why companies push their apps on users. The best option possible is if you can run something like Graphene OS and do everything in the browser with minimal 3rd party apps, and of course, avoid running google services.