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Comment by growse | Hacker News Reader

Claiming sophistry doesn't make it so, you have to try a little harder than that.

The original assertion was "If you care about privacy, don't use Android". A more nuanced and useful assertion would be this: If you don't trust a specific private company with your information, don't volunteer it to them. If you don't trust Apple/Google/Microsoft with all of your data, don't buy a device with a radio they have root access on and store all your data on it and carry it with you everywhere you go. This isn't Android-specific.

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Sophistry in the sense that according to any reasonable idea of privacy, meeting someone in public, so that they know where you are, your name and your face, is distinctly different from a private company knowing exactly where you are at all moments.

Imagine if it came out that a company had hired private investigators to follow you around, and collected a list of every location you visited. You tell someone else, and they say "if you really cared about privacy, you should not have come out in public, for instance I met you, and now I know your name, and that you visit this place". It is just nowhere near equivalent.

> a private company knowing exactly where you are at all moments

Someone else commented that this has already been the case for ... at least a decade, for basically everyone (in the U.S.) – the cell phone carriers are those private companies. And there is substantial evidence that they're even less trustworthy than Google.

So Google gets a free pass for collecting information the user explicitly opted not to provide because another company does it too?

I hope you realize how flawed that line of logic is.

Telecommunications companies are utilities whose use of this data is highly regulated. Google not only has locaton, it has contacts, browsing history, calendar, gmail, etc, and it has the legal right to combine this information together.

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