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Comment by eka808 | Hacker News Reader

And after reading that, let's take a deep breath and think about Android.

From my personal opinion, it's not better than and maybe worse : - Obligation of having a G+ account. Disable it is NOT straighforward at all and it will try to recreate himself often. - Personal content publicly uploaded/displayed in G+ account I had the bad surprise, and few friends also to see that the photos taken with my android phone were automatically published on my G+ account !

When you notify what it's visible, you are are afraid about what is not visible...

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In Android you can deactive all phone home and cloud features, also most Android device manufactore add various apps that require no cloud connection at all. The same goes for iOS were it is even easier.

In contrary to Windows 10 were you can't deactivate several phone home and cloud features. Severals apps are only shipped as cloud-only. The Windows update is forced on you and cannot be deactivated. And to top it, every feature update (like Threshold 2) resets your personal privacy settings and more as it is basically a system upgrade that often also replaces device drivers. So Android, iOS, OSX and all other OS incl. Windows up to v8.1 are way better for the end user - as there they still have the choice and decide for themself.

It takes a lot more than cutting Google out of the OS to truly make it secure and private: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardenin...

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Report finds Android/iOS apps regularly 'spy on users' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34732514

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, and Carnegie-Mellon universities studied 110 apps available on Google Play and the Apple App Store. They found 73% of the Android apps shared users' email addresses, and 47% of the iOS apps shared location data. Android health app Drugs.com shared medical information - including words such as "herpes" - with five third-party domains, including doubleclick.net and googlesyndication.com. The research also found that 93% of the Android apps tested connected to the domain safemovedm.com

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>In contrary to Windows 10 were you can't deactivate several phone home and cloud features.

Configure telemetry and other settings in your organization https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208%28v=vs....

Spybot Anti-Beacon https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

On any system, Microsoft says that Basic level telemetry doesn't send any identifiable information.

You can configure the Android firewall, done.

Win10 firewall especially has a hardcoded whitelist for Microsoft phone home IP address ranges and domains - how evil is that? You would have to patch the kernel mode network driver dll to make sure Win10 won't phone home, a software firewall would still have to rely on Microsofts kernel mode dll. And why would one trust them anymore - they were the first company that handed over their data (Hotmail/Outlook.com) as we learned last year (neither Apple nor Google cooperated). And I always thought Microsoft has a solid business and has no reason to rely on advertisement business and therefor label the user data as products, things have changed since Ballmer. Fact is Win10 on PC and mobile is impossible to secure without running it behind a hardware firewall (or Enterprise license) - and who is running around with a hardware firewall device connected to their phone/notebook?

So did you actually read any of the links?

> to make sure Win10 won't phone home

Windows 10 is "Windows as a Service" and is continuously updated from the web, based on telemetry. It also runs on smartphones and games consoles. It includes notifications, cloud (OnDrive) integration and an intelligent assistant (similar to Siri, Google Now and Alexa).

Sure. But have your read my comment? Your second paragraph is really comical as an answer. But thanks for listing all negative things that many don't want. Win7 has non of them or can be deactivated. Win7 is great.

The problem is Microsoft trust their metrics too much. Since Office XP and WinXP the collect usage statistics (which can be turned off in all of their software except Win10!). Of course most power users and companies turn them off, that's why we got Ribbon bars in Office and Windows, and weird UI designs - based on skewed statistics. Windows as a service is probably a tipping point for Microsoft, we will see how it goes. WinPhone7-10, XBoxOne and Win8x aren't very successful. A new CEO, a new head of PR & brands and a new head of user interface design would do wonders.

> Of course most power users and companies turn them off

Great way to make sure that your views and usage patterns don't contribute to the development of the software.....

Instead just /thinking/, try reading the rest of the gnu site, including the article on android: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.html. Or you could buy a book which has most of the articles and had a new updated release a few months ago: http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society-3-pap...

No, Android doesn't require a Google account.

Perhaps you're talking about Google services instead

Yes, let's talk about Android. First, let's try and get a few things correct before we talk about it.

1. There is no need for a Google+ account. Why you would say this makes me wonder if you even use the platform.

2. You don't even need a Google account and can use the phone without one.

3. Getting back to the Google+ account. If you don't want one or would like to delete your existing one then there's a simple way to do it.

Agreed However, as a lambda user, by buying an android phone and following the default "init procedure" you would have a G+ account without really asking it.. If you disable it, if you try to do something on YouTube, your G+ account will come back as herpes comes back...

The problem is not really what is possible to do but how much effort is needed to protect his privacy using google tools.

And, by the way, photo upload is opt in, it is disabled by default.

And public sharing us disabled by default.

If they have been uploaded and made public us because you did it.

I would say that the GUI related to that is sufficiently unclear for making you doing that without wanting it.

Moreover, If it was only me, I would say that I'm too stupid for understanding how it works but this happened to friends of mine also who are way too smart for doing that :)

Unclear? You have to enter in the setting and click a check box where it it clearly states that the pictures will be backed up.

But you're now changing the goalposts, facts are:

- There is no obligation of having a Google Plus account - Picture backup is disabled until you opt in - By default all the picture uploads are private

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