You're right Google no longer has the trust it used to enjoy. So many apps have been uploading entire call logs and it's really absurd this was so easiy accessible to all apps.
Android and ios are both completely opaque operating systems... stop pretending they are not.
With this philosophy, I’d suggest you’d avoid paying attention to the trajectory of Chinese society, perhaps even more so now that Google plans to get in bed with the CCP’s censorship and dissident quashing regime...
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military...
I too hope that Googlers block what their execs are planning to do in China, but we're not there yet, and it should give one pause that their leadership are onboard with doing this in the first place.
From the article I linked, which is an interview with a Googler who helped lead the resistance-
Interviewee:
...
They also tried to downplay the scope and involvement of the project. But that rhetoric dissolved when we found out that leadership had been lying.
Interviewer:
What were they lying about?
Interviewee:
From the beginning, they told us that Project Maven was a small contract purely for non-offensive purposes. They said that we weren’t building anything custom. They said that this was a one-off project only worth $9 million, and that it wasn’t part of any further collaboration with the Pentagon.
Those all turned out to be lies. On April 12, DefenseOne published an article that landed like a bombshell in the company. Drawing on conversations with Pentagon officials, it revealed that Project Maven was actually a pilot project for future collaborations between Google and the military. In particular, Project Maven was part of Google’s push to win the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract.
JEDI is the military’s next-generation cloud that will network American forces all over the world and integrate them with AI. It’s basically Skynet. And all the big cloud providers want to win the contract because it’s worth $10 billion.
When we found out that Project Maven was an audition for JEDI, people started becoming extremely concerned. And as the media attention to the story increased, we learned a lot more. For instance, Diane Greene had told us that the Project Maven contract was only for $9 million, but internally they expected it to increase to $250 million per year. And they weren’t just giving the Pentagon access to open-source software — they were going to build a massive surveillance system that gave military analysts real-time information on people, vehicles, and buildings in a Google Earth–style interface.
Exposing all of those lies damaged leadership on this issue just as much as anything else that we did. That loss of trust really hurt them.
Don't assume people at the top have an agenda that are compatible with yours.
The fact we are enjoying a lot of peace and freedom right now should now be a signal for us to relax : democracy is a system that needs maintenance, not some legacy you can claim ad vitam.
It's our duty as a citizen to always doubt the intentions of those in power. Just like it's a flight intendent duty to check that the planes doors safety are engaged again and again. It's not a moral issue. It's just a technical requirement.
Not that we shouldn't keep an eye on them, of course. The great bulk of their revenue comes from advertising, which is all about selling users to advertisers. But I don't think Android makes the picture any worse.
The spookiness is even greater for those of us that know what it means to live under repressive regimes.
Honestly Android allows me to tune out of the internet business model a lot easier than iOS. Just dive into permissions and install a system wide adblocker. You can even bypass the app store.
>Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-...
Don't trust Facebook or anything they own.