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Comment by lost_name | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I have my doubts that this applies to a generic call/sms on any old Android device. I would think it's more likely to apply to services such as the Hangouts calling or Google Voice, and probably Google Fi, all of which make sense to collect that data, but the privacy policy doesn't absolve itself of that.

> When this Privacy Policy applies

> Our Privacy Policy applies to all of the services offered by Google Inc. and its affiliates, including YouTube, services Google provides on Android devices, and services offered on other sites (such as our advertising services), but excludes services that have separate privacy policies that do not incorporate this Privacy Policy.

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For what it's worth, I have my doubts that this applies to a generic call/sms on any old Android device.

Does it matter? This is completely in line with their privacy strategy the last few years. Slowly add new terms to the privacy policy, so that people find it acceptable. When asked, point to some unharmful or obvious application. At any rate, it makes it possible to do what the article stated. And since a lot of stuff happens in Google Play Services these days, it becomes kind of hard to find out how the privacy statement is operationalized.

Their "Machine learning first" position[0] makes them even more dependent on data collection, even for basic things. I doubt the two trends are unrelated.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11954988

This isn't a trend, they've collected such data since 2012.

And data science - being derived from statistics - tends to work better with a corpus of data than without one.

Disclaimer: These views are my own.

> Does it matter?

Well, yes because that's the accusation, but no because you're correct in the sense is that you have to assume the worst if they aren't making it clear. Once the catch-all is in place they can do what they want and there doesn't have to be a clear indication that anything has changed.

I attempted to find something that would indicate they had to suddenly include that clause, but the closest I found was the introduction of Google Voice to the iPhone[1] a month before the SMS[2] was first mentioned. Apple's site makes no mention of metadata collection so I assume this has nothing to do with it.

The more I try to defend it the less convinced I am.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Voice#Rejection_from_th... Mentions Sept. 2010 and Nov. 2010 as being important dates around the iPhone release.

[2]: https://www.google.de/intl/en/policies/privacy/archive/20101... First mention of SMS in Privacy Policy.

Isn't Messenger AOSP?

It's not. Google stopped open sourcing a lot of their apps with Android L. IIRC the material Calendar app also isn't open source.

Source: I was working on https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms when Messenger was released.

The whole point of big data is to collect whatever is available and reason about how to use it afterwards. So I guess we can be pretty sure that Google collects as much as they can.

> For what it's worth, I have my doubts that this applies to a generic call/sms on any old Android device.

Why would you have such doubts? Companies are not in the business of making you comfortable and ensuring you have the privacy that you value, they're there to maximize shareholder value. Because you trust a corporation to not make money off of you by personalizing even further, if they can?

> For what it's worth, I have my doubts that this applies to a generic call/sms on any old Android device.

Why? What incentive is there to not collect that data if they've deemed it valuable enough to adjust their policies to collect it?

The blog post states that

> during each phone call, Android tries to connect to a Google server

The regular phone dialer and Messenger app are Google products. Therefore technically you are agreeing to allow them access to your regular call/SMS data.

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