Globally iOS is about 15% to 20% max. So the onus would be on Apple to integrate RCS into iMessage in order to reach the majority of the market.
I can't see RCS succeeding anyway but it won't be because of Apple. It'll be because it took 11 years to come to market and even my dentist uses WhatsApp now.
Apple's only responsibility is to itself, and its shareholders.
The fact that some corporations act ruthlessly and mercenary with regards to human rights and individual suffering (like Facebook in the recent data scandal), does not abrogate our collective and individual obligation to a higher ethical practice.
I'm arguing that any such constructed framework is merely fiction. Only what we actually enforce matters, but that there is a distinction between a moral obligation enforced by some concept of being moral or immoral and social obligations enforced by social reaction. I then point out that social obligations are flawed (not that we shouldn't use them, but we should be aware of their flaw).
>Yes, building a justice system, laws, social norms and culture is hard.
And these are different than moral obligations. Laws are enforced by the state. Social norms and culture are enforced by different social reactions, anything from 'tut tutting' and social disapproval to outright violence.
>That doesn't mean we should give up on figuring it out.
I'm not saying we should give up. I'm saying that trying to use moral obligations as the tool is no more useful than using religious obligations are (outside of a theocracy, though in that case religious and legal obligations co-mingle). I'm saying we should use social and legal obligations instead.
So by abandoning ethics you are actually cutting off a source for improvements of our social and legal norms.
I'd also would like to point out that it doesn't follow from being constructed that something is 'merely fiction'. Everything in humanities is constructed (and some would even argue that everything in science is constructed). The question is: does it impact our lives? And ethical reasoning obviously does it.
It would also probably regress iOS Apple’s customers have already paid money for.
How is any of that morally “the right thing”?
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17252486/google-android-m...
This will be driven by carriers turning off legacy SMS and MMS servers the same way they turned off 2G GSM.
Where? In Canada I use MMS every day.
If Google prioritized the privacy of users thet would build a similar product as the default Android messaging service, hopefully as an open platform.
I have been very reluctant to switch to Android for precisely this reason. It represents a lack of concern for user privacy.
I wish Apple would open the protocol.
I still want something that federated, secure(able) and easy to self-host. But I really don't see the need for another iMessage.
Of course Google is only implementing RCS here. That would be the agreed (with governments & telcos) standard, the result of regulation. Needless to say, it totally exposes everything to government, and to telcos, and to "interoperability providers" (which Google would be). It is strictly worse than Google when it comes to privacy. I think it includes more than just their chat messages, it seems to include things where you'd be like "why does this need to be part of chat ?" like location.
And it comes with a little something for telcos that I doubt anyone here will like : per-message billing. On the plus side: it will work without a data subscription (I think). On the minus side: per-message billing, with or without data subscription.
So the net effect is that people are being deceived - by amnesty no less - into pressuring Google and governments to expose more of their private information to more parties.
Unfortunately what this does mean is that Google is now caving to government demands - full exposure of everyone's information all the time, without any reason or oversight. Not just to the government, but because the government is also incompetent and can't be bothered to actually store these or make them searchable, they demand you also give all telcos access to it (who will then store it and make it accessible to government agents), and we all know most of those telcos will outsource actually doing this, because they're government monopolies.
Sharing current location with contacts is a pretty basic feature.
* At the time I was using Android, they were using a plethora of dark patterns to force me to continuously share my location with the "Google Maps" application, even if not in use. Indicating that they weren't just slurping the location info via Android. Most likely because of legal concerns: there are plenty of alternatives to the "Google Maps" application, there are only 2 widely adopted mobile OSes; the spectre of anti-monopoly action looms large.
* There are legal arguments to be made to prevent my operator from profiting from my location information.
> Commercial privacy of location information in the United States
> The U.S. does limit commercial use of location information under the (US) Telecommunications Act, at 47 CFR §222. The Telecommunications Act, at 47 CFR §222(f), requires consent from the subscriber, and prohibits telecommunication common carriers from accessing location information for purposes other than system operation without consent of the customer.[28] Businesses such as LocationSmart, which provide a tracking service based on subscriber information, require mobile users' consent prior to tracking.[29]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_tracking#United_S...
* Right, my point. Google knows where you are.
* "customer consent" could that not just be a buried paragraph in the contract you signed to get the plan?
There have been ways to tell friends where we are since forever, no need to let Google know. My GPS is turned off, I could buy a phone without it.
I want to be able to share my location with Google so that they can share it with one of my contacts. I then want Google to discard that information. I don't want them to share it with other parties unless I consent specifically to each instance. My consent should be informed (a lot of problems would be solved if we just held businesses to higher standards in terms of disclosing their business practices).
I'm even OK with certain exceptions that are consistent with principles that Western civilization is built on. For example if Google retains that information for a period of time solely for the purpose of complying with a lawful search by the police, for which a warrant was obtained based on a reasonable and specific suspicion, I'm OK with that.
We don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water.
On the flip side, if communication with your contacts is encrypted end to end [possibly with law enforcement agencies with a warrant having access to decryption keys], then no matter how much monetary incentive Google has to violate your privacy, they can't.
How about we build systems that keep creepy stalkers at bay by design? What happened with "can-do" attitude in the hacker-sphere?
The feature being discussed here is literally the ability to manually press a button to send your location to your contact. With the new Android permission model you can even block the app from reading your permissions when not using it.
B. The ability to manually press a button to send your location to your contact without man-in-the-middle snooping.
All I'm saying is that B is better than A, for me personally and for our society at large.
I dug up the RCS5.1 spec [0]. RCS location is not a benign feature where a user is sharing its location every once in a while by pressing a button. RCS location appears to be continuously broadcasted on unsecured channels, open to third party middle men, for example Google, Verizon or three letter agencies. Note the last bullet point, "Geolocation". Perhaps I'm reading this wrong, and this is not yet another veiled attempt at commercial surveillance. Please educate me.
From Section 3.7, Social Presence Information:
===
In the EAB, the contact information is extended with social presence information and foresees the following attributes:
* Availability, indicates the user’s (un)willingness to communicate,
[snip]
* Geolocation, depicts the user location
[snip]
Once User A has accepted User B as an RCS authorized contact, User B will be able to see the geolocation information of User A (displayed with a text or a map, or both of them) and all updates of that information.
===
[0] https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wp-content/uploads/2013/...
Frankly there is no way that Google's RCS app streams your location to any endpoint without an explicit opt in in the app. I'll eat my hat if I'm wrong.
Shameful.
Google has many choices: don't implement clear-text geolocation presence, don't implement RCS, speak up in the standards committee, communicate the implication to Google users, etc. Google chose to silently use a dark pattern to enable 24/7 location snooping.
Shameful.
"Share with your friends" means "Share with your friends, and we'll snoop/aggregate everything that's ever shared by anyone using our platform in perpetuity and use it to subvert your will, haha 'private communication' is so XX century".
RCS is yet another excuse to implement this dark pattern, with explicit provisions to include unencrypted 24/7 geolocation information in it. Google just rehauled their Android messaging strategy around RCS. They deserve to be called out on it.
PS. You claimed "The feature being discussed here is literally the ability to manually press a button to send your location to your contact." Until you take that back as factually false [it's continuously sending, not gated by a button press per send], we're done here.
They did have a choice to adopt it themselves.
It's only a "step backwards" if you for some reason don't consider decentralized, standardized protocols implementable by anyone superior to centralized, closed-source walled-garden services.
RCS could have been amazing as a general-purpose protocol for short datagrams that could be sent/received in areas where you can't get a data connection. It would effectively enable every chat app to work when the network is under load but carriers opted for the walled garden.
Google is stuck working with things their partners will support. They can't reliably be dictatorial like Apple can.
Why not?
If they never shipped an RCS client and made Allo part of the required Android install for Play Services compliance, who is going to stop them?
They choose not to be dictatorial.
The article doesn't either. Yet somehow you were at the bottom of the page for me. I don't understand why.