this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Privacy

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

they wouldn’t mind letting third party apps have access to it

i think they would mind, since their business model is build around selling "metadata data for advertising" ... and sharing the raw data of is not in their interest, since that would allow others to compete with them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Google is particularly good at keeping the data they harvest to themselves. Like, how often was there a breach? They seem to put quite some effort into securing their systems