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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

I am wondering if the surveillance capitalism we have now would have been impeded if NOKIA was still around in full force. I miss time when my phone didn't track everything I did. The only alternative I own now is running on SailfishOS, from MeeGo team members.

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It’s the apps that spy on you, largely not the OS.

If you lock down your app permissions and install the bare minimum of apps that you need or aren’t practical as web versions, you can absolutely limit your blast radius.

Changing your OS to sailfish isn’t helping you on its own. Sailfish can run Android apps, so if you installed an Android app and gave it those permissions, you’d have the same problem.

It's not just your phone that spies on you, it's mostly the apps on it that do. With no Android to push it so hard and fast, perhaps surveillance capitalism would be a bit less developed by now, but I doubt the difference would be all that big. The allure of corrupt money is just too high, and the pressure is industry-wide.

But it's the OS that allows apps to spy on you.

There's only so much an OS can do about it. Every feature that can be used for tracking has also legitimate user-beneficial uses.

Not true, Symbian was highly locked down. You needed permission for pretty much anything, and some of them required you to ask Nokia for permission. It's probably part of the reason why it didn't take off in the US.

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