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?
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.
This only applies to what they share. Encryption exists. There is no effective container. GDPR only applies to data that is being sold to 3rd parties. Telemetry and fingerprinting is still collected and there is no way to stop it except to avoid the servers outright. The code you are running is a proprietary binary connected to a proprietary server on the internet. There is no auditing that can verify or stop what is transmitted. The only step that is can be audited is when the data is sold publicly. Talk to anyone working for google. They know absolutely everything about everyone internally. This data is never sold publicly in a way that is disclosed, but it is obvious that several large retailers have access. The data transaction is not public. The USA has nothing in place to stop this or audit it. US capitalism operates like a country at war. Nothing is off limits. Everything that can be exploited is exploited.