Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS | Hacker News Reader

Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

therecord.media

816 pointsgormandizer442 comments

" Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways." -Google

This is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doing this because phones made it normal. It's wrong in both cases.

It's similar to when Apple defended it's 30% store cut by claiming it's an "industry standard"... specifically, an industry standard that Apple established.

The 30% cut was considered very good at the time. It was way better than the 50-90% cut that traditional publishers would take.

A sibling comment notes that Steam charged 30% at the time (though some had better deals) but it's worth noting that Steam was not an open platform that anyone could publish on. Much like for consoles, to put a game on Steam you had to have a preexisting relationship with Valve, or try to develop one with no certainty of success. This was also considered a very generous cut because getting on Steam was almost a guarantee of financial success.

"The 30% cut was considered very good at the time."

Let me fix this.

There was a full range of views. Some considered the 30% cut to be good at the time, some didn't consider it much at all, some considered it to be a criminal abuse of market power. I remember commenting myself that microsoft would be crucified for attempting to tax everyone who wanted to write software for windows 30% of revenue. I don't recall anyone suggesting that was a controversial comment.

You want to talk about a criminal abuse of market power?

Microsoft used to charge ridiculous fees for things as simple as submitting a patch for an XBox 360 game.

>Double Fine's Tim Schaefer pegged the cost of submitting an Xbox 360 patch at $40,000 in an interview with Hookshot Inc. earlier this year.

"We already owe Microsoft a LOT of money for the privilege of being on their platform," he said. "People often mistakenly believe that we got paid by Microsoft for being exclusive to their platform. Nothing could be further from the truth. WE pay THEM."

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/microsoft-comes-under...

People who think a 30% fee is outsized tend to have no idea whatsoever what the costs were previous to that.

I don't know the specifics of Xbox and patches but I do know that in general, at least in the past, shipping a game on Playstation required thousands of hours of testing by Sony employees. They didn't take your word for it that your app worked. They ran it through a battery of manual testing. Examples, does it recover if someone turns off the power in the middle of saving a game. At that point the save game file may be corrupted. The game better at least boot and let the player start a new game and not just crash.

Other examples include checking all the text meets the platforms spec. It's says "DualShock Controller" not "Joypad". It's always Press ○╳□△ and in the correct color for that button, and responds to the region/system setting. For example that X = select in USA, and ○ = select in Japan

The point being that the game console owners don't just trust that your patch didn't break the rules of their technical requirements checklist. Someone actually has to check and it's not a small amount of work. Maybe $40k is too much but $0 is arguably too little

AFAIK, Apple and Google don't do this much. Certainly not to the same extent as Sony/Nintendo/XBox

What does that have to do with submitting a simple bug fix?

How can that possibly cost $40,000 except through an extreme abuse of monopoly power?

A simple 30% cut with no other price gouging additional fees was a huge improvement over the status quo.

That article has a developer literally saying that in the end, their percentage of the profit on the XBox 360 was a negative number.

I don't get it, why make a exclusive game and pay Microsoft for it...a vulcan would say illogical...it's not like MS has any Hardware, that no one else has.

The costs of making a game work on multiple platforms might exceed the expected revenue from the additional platforms, especially for a smaller organisation.

> $40,000

There are probably a few developers who’d love to pay just 40k to Apple.

Given that review costs are fixed, what is the cost of distribution?

The cost of vetting your app and it's updates are included in the 30%, not an additional $40,000 fee on top of it.

Note the developer saying that with all the additional costs, they ended up in the hole instead of making a profit.

Let me fix this.

Microsoft did worse, they did charge more than 30% to everyone that published software for the xbox.

People with skin in the game, game publishers, game developers, mobile app developers for nokia, blackberry, samsung, motorola, etc, considered Apple taking "only" 30% to be an excellent deal at the time. It was so good in fact, almost all other store splits collapsed shortly thereafter to the same 30% to compete with Apple.

Others complained, sure. I too complain Ferrari charges way too much for customizing the color of the thread of the interior lining on their cars, I don't know why they don't seem bothered.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Steam and Xbox Live Arcade (small games akin to mobile today, not mainstream games) were both 30% before the iPhone existed.

Apple, however, transformed the phone industry by bringing that same model to mobile that had already existed in PC/console game storefronts.

You don't think there was a range of views. And anyone who disagreed with your view had no skin in the game and so can be ignored. I disagree with that.

I know there was a range of views. I'm pointing out not all opinions have the same weight.

I have worked in mobile since 2004. How anyone felt about it is irrelevant.

The fact is that 30% was far less than the carriers and Qualcomm were taking with their stores.

Hoping someone will chime in and share ringtone royalty rates back when they were selling by the millions. I’d bet labels got under 50% and artists got basically nothing.

the iPhone is a PDA. There's 20 years of PDAs before iPhone. There was no price to put an app on my 1998 Windows CE PDA, nor my Sony Clie, nor my Dell Axim. Just install the software same as PC. The software vendors had the option to sell direct, go through a distributor, a publisher, various stores, etc..

Phones were an entirely different world.

For instance, Verizon was sued for disabling the ability of phones on their network to transfer photos using Bluetooth, because they wanted to charge you money for a simple file transfer.

https://www.eweek.com/mobile/verizon-wireless-users-sue-over...

I think there's a lot of truth to this take. Pre-iPhone phones were a completely different category of phone. They ran limited, special-purpose operating systems. Smartphones of today are pocket computers that just happen to be able to make phone calls.

And yes, they connect to a wireless carrier's network. But I can also connect my laptop to a wireless carrier's network by buying a USB dongle and a SIM card. I'm certainly not expecting anyone to pay 30% of their revenue to sell me an app on my laptop.

Also consider the iPod Touch. It is much closer to being a PDA than a phone, despite the fact that it's essentially an iPhone without a cellular modem.

Microsoft didn't really have a comparable App Store at the time, not to mention, Apple hadn't really made a comparable App Store for the Mac yet either. The iPhone app model was more analogous to the business model of gaming consoles (and Steam), except with lower barrier to entry.

Today, I'm sure you could still publish independently of Steam... but you'd be at a disadvantage.

Microsoft also never managed to build a system that was secure enough to do e.g. banking on. I just noticed how I can do everything from my iPhone just using my fingerprint and don't even feel unsafe about it. I love that there are different approaches like you mentioned and hope that they continue to exist and are not overruled by a central authority as you suggest.

In the mobile world there were so many intermediaries and costs to publish then that included:

-the mobile carriers cut - up to 70 percent

-the publishers cut (depending on whether you used them). up to 70 percent (carrier fees included).

-some publishers requiring apps to be code signed like Java Verified (a cost that could go up to 50 thousand dollars PER J2ME/JAVA ME app) or Symbian Signed or BREW.

It was a horrific time to build mobile apps.

I am still not defending the 30 percent cut. Just that the cost was seen as trivial then (also the miniscule 99 yearly membership fee that included code signing - Blackberry started at 2500 USD a year).

A simple solution to all this mess is to have rules allowing us to download apps (at our own risk) from outside the app store like you can on Android.

This is such a nonsense justification.

You want to sell software you wrote to run on an iphone. You have zero choice. Apple tax your revenue.

You want to sell software you wrote to run on a pc. Steam is not your only choice. I am not defending steam or valve here, I've never sold anything using their stuff, nor am I suggesting anything other than that their market power over pc compared to apple's store over the iphone is not remotely comparable.

It actually works against you to suggest apple's iphone software store and steam are comparable at all because it's so incredibly bogus.

You want to make the case that steam suck too but with loads less market power. Go right ahead. We're listening. You don't need absolute and total market power to be abusive of it. Apple will immediately attempt redefine the market to include android or people spending money on coca cola instead of apple product to suggest that customers have real choice so there is no market power abuse here.

The situation on Android shows us that consumers like consolidation and they like walled gardens and simple choices. These things benefit them. Plenty of Android phones come with 2 or 3 app stores. One for the carrier, one for the vendor and Google Play Store. There plenty are others as well, but the market has spoken. Even Epic had to fold and move to Play Store. Maybe Google played dirty, but I think it's perfectly clear users benefit from consolidation. They like the simplicity of having everything in one store and when they change devices they just set up their Play Store account and there everything is. That's a massive advantage to them. Fragmentation is a nightmare.

Developers have come to the same conclusion, it's to their benefit for the customers to all be on one store with one set of policies and features so that's where the majority of the apps go.

So what are you going to do, force Apple to become a fragmented Android copy with multiple stores and side loading that a tiny fraction of techies actually use? Those people already have that on Android if they want it. Honestly you'd just screw over Apple and a few other people over a principle hardly anybody actually cares about or benefits from. It certainly wouldn't make any significant commercial difference. We ran that experiment and the results are in.

The idea that users would all be side loading apps and developers would be making far more money having their apps spread across 5+ different stores that would compete down to lower prices is delusional. If that were the case, why has this not happened on Windows or MacOS where side loading is actually the default yet Steam, GOG, etc still charge 30%? It's crystal clear that's just the split the market has converged on through a competitive process. After all Steam has competed from day one with a default split of nothing for direct downloads from the software publisher but has thrived charging 30%. If that's not direct market validation I don't know what is.

Are people buying software through steam because they like the consolidated experience? Or because they trust it more than an exe from a random website? Or because steam already has their credit card info stored? Or because it's the only place to obtain certain games?

It's some combination of these things (and some others I haven't considered), and the value all of this added up, minus steam's downsides, is apparently worth an extra 30% if this cost is sufficiently hidden from the consumer.

Would people still pay a 30% fee if the store were forced to actually show the fee, and there were alternatives? I'm not so sure.

You're right that there's some value there, but it's probably closer to 3% than 30%.

There are alternatives, you can sell the software directly from your own website. Publishers have decided that the reach the store gives them is worth the 30%.

Fragmentation and walled gardens are a false dichotomy. Steam is actually a great example of this, there are many other stores (Humble Bundle, Fanatical, GMG, whatever) that sell you Steam keys so you can keep your game library in one comfortable place.

Yes Steam are still perfectly comfortable staying at 30% as I said it's clearly a market driven level.

> The idea that users would all be side loading apps and developers would be making far more money having their apps spread across 5+ different stores that would compete down to lower prices is delusional. If that were the case, why has this not happened on Windows or MacOS where side loading is actually the default yet Steam, GOG, etc still charge 30%?

That has happened. The majority of my 20,000 Steam games were acquired from outside of Steam.

I think the point is that Steam manages to do just fine while charging 30%, on a platform where developers could easily choose to self-publish. For small developers, that 30% is worth it because the value Steam brings to them is worth more than the revenue it takes. The only ones choosing to go elsewhere are massive publishers that can market their own storefronts, and indie devs taking large up front payments from Epic to leave Steam.

I can see both sides of the argument here. It sucks having no choice as a developer, and feeling forced pay Apple a tax just to get paid for your work. It's especially egregious with subscriptions, where Apple doesn't even do any of the content delivery. However, as a user, I think it would also suck if a huge player like Facebook or Google decided to open up their own iOS App Stores, and developers started flocking to them as a means to escape Apples increasingly strict app privacy rules.

It’s weird to compare Steam’s market power over PCs to Apple’s market power over the iPhone. The obvious difference is that the iPhone is a product created by and sold exclusively by Apple. Why would we expect Steam to have comparable market power over the entire PC industry? A much better comparison would be Apple’s market power over smartphones, which is probably comparable to Steam’s market power (as a video game store) over PCs!

Are you implying that you feel entitled to sell software on Apple's tightly controlled consumer devices?

I am stating, very clearly, that Apple have massive market power that they are abusing. This is known in economics circles as "market failure" and across the spectrum from Keynsians to Neo-classical economists is seen as a compelling case for regulation.

Why are you implying I am saying something different to what I /said/.

They are entitled to sell software on Apple customer's devices.

Why shouldn't he? When did we decide to let Nintendo, pardon me, Apple, dictate our digital lives?

- - - - -

https://www.filfre.net/2016/04/generation-nintendo/

> In a landmark ruling against Tengen in March of 1991, Judge Fern Smith stated that Nintendo had the right to “exclude others” from the NES if they so chose, thus providing the legal soil on which many more walled gardens would be tilled in the years to come.

- - - - -

The simple fact that Apple feels they have to enforce this proves they're afraid. If they <<knew>> that their model is absolutely superior, they'd just let people choose.

But if they do that, they'll lose tens of billions of dollars in revenue. So it's not about "security" or whatever, it's just about money.

This is the same company that nickels and dimes every Lightning cable maker to the tune of several billions of dollars, when USB C has been around for many years.

The same company that removed the headphone jack for bogus reasons just to create a market for wireless headphones, worth several billion dollars.

I could go on and on and on about their anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices.

I can't help but feel like having it this way is breaking one of the huge reasons that made computers so absurdly exciting and enticing in the past.

The fact that there was this wide open field, where, sure, maybe you paid Microsoft for the OS, but then the rest was up to you. Trade shareware CDs, install stuff from the internet, type in code from a book or whatever, it felt like an infinite open field of possibilities.

I guess it's normal that the exciting frontier shifts around, but I really can't believe that it's somehow a good thing in this case.

You can still do all those things on a computer.

And now it’s so easy to put up a web app that I’d argue barriers are much, much lower than when you had to figure out how to get your physical software distributed.

The goals of “keep grandpa from getting his life savings stolen by malicious software” and “allow a power user to do whatever they want” can literally never be solved by the same device. If there’s any way to disable protections then the scammers will get grandpa to do it. And the market for grandpas is much larger than the market for tinkerers.

This is false.

Windows used to be a sieve. The infection rates and general abuse Windows received went down by orders of magnitude once they added UAC and the default malware scanner/antivirus.

And they didn't need to lock down everything, completely.

The rest is an easy money grab from the OS vendors who obviously don't want to remain "dumb pipes".

And the market for grandpas is much larger than the market for tinkerers.

This kind of thing has become a meme. It's basically irrelevant. If the market of tinkerers was big enough 20 years ago, it's more than big enough now, and the GPU shortage kind of proves that. It's also an all-or-nothing fallacy -- nobody can protect all financial victims, and restricting the tech device market is probably one of the least effective ways to try. There are much better chokepoints for combatting both malware and fraud than the sanitized amusement park experience.

> You can still do all those things on a computer.

Have you tried to distribute software on macOS out of the App Store recently?

> I can't help but feel like having it this way is breaking one of the huge reasons that made computers so absurdly exciting and enticing in the past.

We live in a bubble, so it was exciting for us.

The iPhone was exciting for everyone, for the whole world, and in no small part because normal people finally felt confident enough to try all that sweet sweet software that became available thanks to people like you who don't need a safety net to tinker with stuff.

People were still doing iPhone stuff before the iPhone. You had blackberry and palm offering email, internet, games, and mms to the masses and the devices were quite popular for those who could afford them.

The iPhone only became a device for the masses, truly, when carriers started subsidizing the older models for zero down, around the iPhone 4g era. This has continued today where Verizon currently offers the iPhone SE for "$0/mo" like some cheap flip phone of old. Before that, the iPhone was exclusively rich persons phone, and probably still would have been in the U.S. at least (like it is in the rest of the world) had it not been for carrier subsidies and cheaper mobile internet plans (or maybe just the normalization of spending so much on a mobile plan every month). The iPhone didn't even get third party apps until years after launch, and when it did, the most popular of that sweet sweet software during those early days were mostly dumb stuff like apps that make gunshot sounds, or flash game clones. The real gems during that era was software written by the jailbreak community, and a lot of that added functionality was cloned by apple in later OS versions.

> "The iPhone was exciting for everyone, for the whole world"

You live in a buble, most of the world can't afford to spend $1000 on a phone.

It’s a 15% cut for developers who makes less than $1 million and for most other developers after year 1 on the App Store.

This only happened recently after they've had lawsuits and antitrust suits and Congressional interest.

It depends of course on how you published.

When I was authoring software (over two decades ago) and a company acted as publisher they took 85% of gross.

For author/publisher relationships at that time, this was pretty typical (book authors/publishers being the closest analog).

Needless to say there was, in addition to the cost of creating and shipping floppies, advertising that the publisher had to cover.

Apple's 30% cut seemed fair to me when the App Store arrived.

I'm not sure if I would try to ship an iOS app these days though. Not because of Apple's cut but because of the race to the bottom that was unleashed shortly after the App Store gold rush: where now you don't appear to even be able to sell a $0.99 app.

You are probably right about the cut the publisher took, but the margins are still higher for Apple as they have very low costs of marketing, distribution etc. In fact I think Apple charges way more if you consider the margins.

The other problem is of course that no one else can really enter this space. It's now only Apple and Google. It will be very hard for anyone else to enter. There were many more publishers and the competition and differentiation was higher.

Bullshit - we were building and publishing mobile apps in the early 2000’s and the top rate was 15%.

The 30% cut was considered very good at the time.

No, it wasn't. I'm not going to dig up links, but one could pop a web site storefront and Fastspring for payment processing (as one example of a company I used) for less than 10% (Fastspring would take something like 6-7%, IIRC). Discovery has always sucked on Apple's store, so no value-add there. In fact, I'd argue that the only value-add one gets out of Apple's store is access to their closed garden.

And "50-90%"? Is that in reference to putting software in physical boxes and on CompUSA shelves? Because no mobile publisher charged 90% before Apple's store came along.

IIRC 50% (60%) was the rate for the app distributor I used for selling my PalmOS app. It was digital download, too.

For the Apple case: access to the walled garden is the majority of the benefit. But still, setting up payments, customer service, chargebacks, fees, etc., is nice to have taken care of. 30% nice? Who knows. But more than just the raw payment processor overhead, surely.

AFAIK physical boxes are way above 50%.

There were a couple of stores that were more expensive.

But there's 2 reasons the comparisons aren't valid:

1) The revolution Apple brought to mobile phones was making them personal computers. So the relevant comparison really should be with personal computers and I doubt any of them had stores that took as much of a cut.

2) More relevant, the vast majority of such app stores which charged 40-50% were optional marketplaces. A customer didn't need to go through them to install an app on their phone (I believe Palm was like this. I'm pretty sure the likes of WinMo allowed many different ways to install apps). So if a marketplace was charging 40-70% it was entirely for the fact that they were bringing a customer to you. If you were able to acquire a customer by yourself, you didn't need to pay anyone any cut.

The big problem with Apple's 30% cut has always been that they charge you that amount just for having a user, even if you did all the work to get that user to use and pay for your app. Outside of the maybe 3% credit card fees, Apple provides 0 value.

One may argue (as many Apple folks do) that they charge for the frameworks, etc., but that argument is absolutely backwards. Apple creates the frameworks and APIs because they need the apps, not because the apps need them. If Apple was to get rid of its 3rd party APIs and frameworks, so there were no 3rd party apps, it's not the app developers who would suffer because all those users would migrate to Android. It's the iDevices and Apple that would basically disappear.

In fact, App developers would be thrilled because now they only need to support 1 Operating system.

I remember considering 1-2% to be fair, for the payment processing. Publishers were an old-fashioned thing and not even considered for the comparison.

> The 30% cut was considered very good at the time. It was way better than the 50-90% cut that traditional publishers would take.

Why didn't Steve Jobs go with web distribution of first class web apps or allow Flash on his platform? If they truly wanted to be remarkable, this would have been the future.

The answer is control.

Apple is a cutthroat business just like any other, and their "privacy first" veneer is just a wolf in sheep's clothing. They're playing it up as an attack against Google and Facebook, meanwhile they still phone home about the apps you're running and can shut them off remotely.

Microsoft never taxed software on their platform. Jobs had to invent that business model. It flourished like wildflowers thanks to him.

'First class web apps' was precisely how you were supposed to create apps for the first iPhone; the SDK was thrown together over the next year only after the huge demand for writing native apps. The iPhone pushed a bunch of device access web APIs originally explicitly for this reason.

> Why didn't Steve Jobs go with web distribution of first class web apps

That was exactly his intent when he announced the iPhone, and he got absolutely obliterated by the internet for it.

*exactly what he claimed was his intent. There's no way Steve Jobs cared so little about quality he thought web apps were preferable.

Not allowing Flash on the iPhone is probably the best thing Apple ever did

Destroying an open, low barrier to entry animation and application platform that was used by teenagers to develop and share interactive content?

Destroying a way to deliver native-like, cross-platform applications without an app store was good?

Jobs did it for control. He didn't want interop between Android and iPhone, and he didn't want any web browser with enough flexibility to do anything sophisticated.

Flash was absolutely garbage on mobile at the time.

Signed, a heavy Windows Mobile user.

This may be pedantic, but Steam was collecting its 30% long before the App Store opened. Thought maybe that was inspired by Apple's cut of music revenues in the iTunes Store.

I could walk into Best Buy and buy the game I want off the shelf. I have no such option if I want to buy an iOS app from a store or the developers themselves.

Steam also don't engage in anti-competitive behavior and prevent billions of people from using alternative game distribution methods like Apple does.

What we need is real competition in the mobile app distribution market to determine whether or not that 30% is actually fair, efficient and competitive. As it stands, there is no competition in mobile app distribution.

That's simply not true, Android outsells iOS, it has multiple App Stores and allows sideloading. Plenty of phones come with 2 or 3 different app stores from the network, vendor and Google. The fact is consumers like app stores, they like consolidation because it makes it simpler for them and a lot of them like the benefits they get from a walled garden. Developers like consolidation too, which is why they have converged on the Play Store en masse on Android. These things benefit them, and the vast, vast majority appreciate those benefits more than they appreciate the benefits of managing multiple competing stores and side loading downloaded APKs.

You can't magic those preferences away. Even if you forced iOS to become an Android clone with multiple app stores and sideloading you can't force people to like those things. You'd just be giving an extra option to a very small subset of techies who have Android now to do that on already anyway. The market has spoken and it likes nice simple well managed choices because that's what the people want.

Why is it that Apple have to make the solution a small subset of people want. Why is that their problem to solve?

Maybe these stores converged on 30% because it's a nice round number and a roughly 1:2 split makes intuitive sense. Consoles, music stores, Steam, mobile app stores, they've all circled around about that number for a very long time. Some have tried around 20/80 to grab market share but it never worked, Nintendo tried 35/65 for a while before going to 30/70. In the end it's natural that competitive forces will tend to a convergence.

> That's simply not true, Android outsells iOS, it has multiple App Stores and allows sideloading.

It's very true. Google acts in an anticompetitive manner to prevent competition in the mobile app distribution market, as well.

Google prevents mobile app distribution competitors from competing with the Play Store on feature parity because user installable 3rd party mobile app stores cannot implement automatic upgrades, background installation of apps, or batch installs of apps like the Play Store can.

Also, iOS has 60% of the market in the US[1], which is the highest in the world. Apple's App Store is responsible for 100% more app store revenue than the Play Store[2].

> Maybe these stores converged on 30% because it's a nice round number and a roughly 1:2 split makes intuitive sense

Instead of guessing, we should let real competition in the mobile app distribution market increase efficiency and drive costs down to their true values instead of letting a cartel decide what they are.

[2] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/

[1] https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-v-ios-market-share

> Why is it that Apple have to make the solution a small subset of people want. Why is that their problem to solve?

Because otherwise they are a populist company.

Imagine a company making clothes in sizes S..XL, but not XXL. Don't you think a company owes it to society to also offer the XXL size?

Instead of thinking "what is better for us?", a company should think "what is better for our customers?"

On the other hand, steam will not stop collecting data about you if you ask.

GOG has much better policies.

For example, GOG sells some games that try to phone home. Many of these were games/franchises that did business with GOG, then were bought.

Take a look at the reviews for Kerbal Space Program, or Stellaris for some of the shenanigans that happened after a game was released.

But because their stance is no-drm and you can play all their games offline, you can block them and the game will still run.

There is no such stance with steam.

> I could walk into Best Buy and buy the game I want off the shelf. I have no such option if I want to buy an iOS app from a store or the developers themselves.

What percentage of that transaction do you think Best Buy would take?

Doesn't really matter to me when I can just go to another store, or on eBay or Facebook and buy it second-hand, or buy it directly from the developer.

>I could walk into Best Buy and buy the game I want off the shelf.

If you try doing it for any PC games released over the past decade, you are more likely than not gonna have a disk with some installable files and a Steam code in the box. Without that Steam code, there is no way for you to play the game.

At this point, there isn't any difference between buying directly from Steam, as opposed to "walking into Best Buy and buying the game you want off the shelf".

Steam does not take a cut from steam keys sold off steam.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

You pay 30% for all the hosting and listing and payment processing. But then you aren't required to use Steam to distribute your game — you could as well set up your own website. There's nothing preventing you. There's no predatory code signing on desktop OSes.

On the other hand, you can't sideload apps onto iOS devices. You HAVE to go through Apple. You either publish on the app store, or you don't have an iOS app. That's different. That's very different. That's antitrust-can't-happen-sooner different.

You aren't required to use the Apple store to distribute your product. You can sell to Android users and desktop/laptop users.

> "That's different. That's very different

Is it? Why is it? You can't sell software to run on Kindle Paperwhite even though it's a full computer inside. What's the specific difference between that and iOS, other than "Apple's ecosystem and customers are desirable, so I want to use it" and "I don't want to pay for it"?

> You aren't required to use the Apple store to distribute your product. You can sell to Android users and desktop/laptop users.

You aren't making much sense. You won't have any semblance of adoption if you don't have presence on iOS. Except maybe in India where iOS market share is tiny.

> You can't sell software to run on Kindle Paperwhite even though it's a full computer inside.

It's an appliance. It's marketed as a device to serve one purpose — read books. Amazon isn't making apps for it either, as far as the user is concerned, there's no notion of application software on these things.

By the way, washing machines and microwaves also have a full computer in them — there's CPU, RAM, and ROM. Yes, tiny and underpowered. Probably not quite powerful enough to run Doom. Computers nonetheless, technically.

Yet no one raises any objections about not being able to run arbitrary code on them. Precisely because of the marketing and expectations.

> What's the specific difference between that and iOS

iPhones and iPads are marketed as general-purpose computing devices. They are not appliances by any stretch of imagination. Yet they are crippled because Apple has knowingly and deliberately put in a limitation so they only run code that was signed by Apple. This limits their general-purposefulness. This forces developers who don't want or need the hosting and listing still go through the app store.

There is no difference.

Just like I can't run third party, unapproved apps on a Tesla, SNES, Gameboy, Samsung TV etc. Or even every website that has a marketplace and supports plugins e.g. Shopify.

Your argument rests on the strange assumption that people who are against IOS restricting apps on the iPhone would for some reason support Amazon's restrictions on Kindle apps.

You can side load apps onto your iOS devices.

You just need to publish on the store in order to sell to other users.

No you can't. Literally the only situation when you don't have to sign your app with an Apple-issued certificate is when the device is jailbroken and has signature enforcement disabled.

You're probably referring to one of these things:

- You can install any app on your own device. This requires an Apple ID (but no $99 membership) and a certificate that Xcode automatically gets from Apple. The certificate is valid for 7 days, after which the app no longer launches. The bundle ID of the app also has to be globally unique.

- There's "enterprise" distribution that requires a developer ID and a certificate. Subject to terms of use. Apple can revoke it at any time. Sometimes Apple turns a blind eye to the misuse of this, but, again, it can and does revoke these certificates remotely disabling any apps signed with them.

You can temporarily install your apps on your own device. They expire after 7 days, and you can't have more than 10 such apps installed simultaneously.

And just to be complete, there is little preventing other people from creating their own Steam (many do) or not using Steam at all (developers can publish their apps directly to users). This is not the case with the App store.

Older app stores and especially physical retail collected a lot more than 30%.

Steam charges that amount because it brought a customer to you.

If I did my own marketing to gamers and they downloaded the game from my website I would have to pay 0% to any intermediary.

I suspect that statement was to placate people with "your car does it too", but mine certainly doesn't --- it doesn't even require a computer to run --- and the statement had the exact opposite effect, namely to revalidate the reason I don't drive a "modern car".

That said, I do have an Android, but it is rooted and spends most of its time off. As I type this message, it is on the other side of the room.

Out of curiosity, how old is your car?

Close to 50 years.

> It's similar to when Apple defended it's 30% store cut by claiming it's an "industry standard"... specifically, an industry standard that Apple established.

Apple established a standard for the Apple app store. There was a lot of complaint about "Apple Tax" and Apple merely pointed out that it wasn't a "Apple Tax". Sure, Apple started it but others which are not even connected to the Apple ecosystem simply followed. They could have not decided to but they did (Re:Table 1) [0]. Microsoft, Samsung, Google and Amazon all have the same 30% tax. Heck, even commission rates for Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo have the same rate (Re : Table 2). I am sure Apple is not forcing them to have those rates.

Somehow, this conversation turns into an "Apple" vs rest conversation. There's no conversation had upon the charges on a digital distribution store. I'd say - let's have that conversation and come up with a number. Currently, the number is decided in a "free market". I would be open to come up to an alternate number. Most arguments against the 30% is that it is too high. Well, every penny that goes out from the developer's pocket is too high. The cost of an iPhone might be too high. Something, being too high is not an argument to not have that rate.

[0] https://www.analysisgroup.com/globalassets/insights/publishi...

this is a classic example of how companies collude without direct communication. it's a type of game theoretic outcome that's actually taught in business school - how to read your competitor's intentions from public information (like pricing intentions) and legally act and counter-communicate publicly your own intentions to not compete (in many cases by not lowering price).

this can practically only happen in oligarchic markets (those controlled by a few large players) who can safely assume a smaller competitor won't undercut them. unfortunately, most major markets in the US are oligarchic, if not downright monopolized (e.g., cellular service).

This is a great comment. It drives me crazy how often people take concepts that apply to an idealized free market and apply them to an area that's controlled by a small number of entrenched behemoths. Very little of the tech industry these days operates like an Econ 101 free marketplace.

> this is a classic example of how companies collude without direct communication.

In that case, let's have that conversation as a society and as a government. "Are companies listed in Table 1 and 2 in collusion as defined by current law?".

In most of the Apple 30% conversations, the conversations seem to be about an instance (Apple) instead of an object (Digital Store Tax, Collusion etc). Lets set the frame and be clear about the conversation we want to have regardless of the business we talk. We can use Apple, Microsoft et al as examples to make the point. We shouldn't replace them with the overarching discussion.

as i understand it, by not communicating directly, companies avoid the most damning potential evidence that they are colluding. it's theoretically possible to still determine that their behavior is collusive, but quite difficult in practice.

i personally think anti-trust/anti-monopoly regulations should be tightened by an order of magnitude or so. any market that exhibits such extended, obviously inflated profit margins needs to be sliced up more finely. any market participant with more than ~10% market share should be scrutinized closely. piercing the corporate veil should be the norm with any anticompetitive infraction (as well as embezzlement, insider trading, and other such executive crimes).

in short, make markets fair (not just 'free').

and in turn, that should allocate capital more efficiently throughout the economy, rather than letting it accumulate inefficiently in fewer and fewer hands.

> There's no conversation had upon the charges on a digital distribution store. I'd say - let's have that conversation and come up with a number. Currently, the number is decided in a "free market".

There is no competition in the mobile app distribution market. Apple and Google have a duopoly on mobile app distribution, and they behave like a cartel when it comes to price fixing.

For over a decade now, consumers and developers could have benefited from real competition in the mobile app distribution market. Real competition between companies means that consumers can benefit from increased efficiencies and reductions in cost when it comes to distributing mobile apps.

Instead, Apple and Google have kept a stranglehold on the mobile app distribution market, and it took over a decade and the threat of regulation before Apple chose to lower costs to developers somewhat.

How can anyone know what prices are "industry standard" or "too high" when it comes to mobile app distribution if there is no real competition in that market, just a cartel consisting of two trillion dollar companies controlling mobile app distribution for nearly 13 years?

I agree - there's no competition. What's your solution to change in the law that will create competition?

At minimum if you operate an app store on your own platform that takes a cut the platform should allow alternative 3rd party stores to be used. Android/Windows/web/MacOS are already there on that software front. iOS/Consoles/SmartTVs and many others are not. It's probably why you hear about the Apple App Store 30% but not the Play/Microsoft Store 30% - those aren't the only options to distribute an app on those platforms. Users are definitely steered and incentivized to use them but not forced.

That in itself isn't a fix all, for example the Amazon app store for Android based devices still takes a 30% cut at the moment, but it opens the floodgates to stores like this that could start to create natural competition. And even if not at least you have the choice to try not to do that, look at Fortnite. Not for the court case but because they took a 0% cut on Android by distributing the app via their own store when they got kicked off due to that battle. Obviously not an option for everyone but you can still load the app on Android devices and Epic Games Store actually only takes a 12% cut as it's trying to compete. Even if none of this ends up mattering - at least one can load what they want on their devices.

At the more extreme end there is always antitrust action like the oft cited idea of splitting the likes of Apple or so on into "Apple Hardware" and "Apple Software" which would definitely blow away some anti-competition tendencies (How many use ios+safari+apple-hardware because that's what they would pick vs that's the only option to get any of the above? Probably less than 100%...) but at the same time are probably a bit extreme when we have tried tamer things like the above before.

I have an android phone and there is one clear difference: I can go elsewhere to get apps other than the official channel. For Microsoft I can go as far as installing a whole different OS on the device. You can do neither with iPhones. Sure, you can buy a different phone but it isn't as simple as that

It even polluted into other markets, like Wolt.com taking a 30% (!!) cut of food delivered using their platform. On top of the actual delivery charges.

I remember thinking that Just-Eat.com were criminals for taking 10%.

Hungry.dk takes 1-2%.

You're comparing apples and oranges.

You're most likely not being fair with what services these platforms provide, or how they structure their fees.

Wolt and other companies like UberEats or Postmates are food discovery, delivery and PoS platforms (and more). They don't operate on any single commission model.

(Ofc one could argue this pricing complexity is intentional so that comparing is more difficult)

> It's similar to when Apple defended it's 30% store cut by claiming it's an "industry standard"... specifically, an industry standard that Apple established.

I thought Apple chose that figure as game developers were already used to it from consoles and Steam.

It goes back much further than that—the mobile phone 'app' market was a lot worse (50%? And not a fun developer process) and was pretty poorly saturated by Java-based games and lightweight apps.

It all depends on what software / 'app' stores we're comparing to.

I honestly don't mind information about crashes being sent as long as it is very sanitized and easy to disable- similar to how Fedora reports issues.

They send only a list of functions on the stack without any of the arguments or data.

Example: https://retrace.fedoraproject.org/faf/problems/bthash/?bth=3...

Where Google goes too far is sending everything in the name of security or better yet to "serve" the user.

IMEI and serial number make sense, I think too: Apple’s activation lock is a big reason why I bought an iPhone and as far as I can tell, it requires interaction with the server on every boot to work.

I disagree on IMEI. It never changes and is unique.

I disagree that telemetry is inherently bad. As product engineers, telemetry is often our only visibility into whether or not a system is functioning healthily. How else can you detect difficult-to-spot bugs in production?

> our only visibility into whether or not a system is functioning healthily.

Your problem here is viewing the end user's setup as part of your system.

It's the user's private system -- why should you have any visibility into how it is functioning?

They said a system, not their system.

Car computers report telemetry to mechanics, and given that digitization allows for economies of scale, this isn't that different.

> Car computers report telemetry to mechanics

Yes -- and they shouldn't.

As a software engineer I disagree. You are saying that you want to collect my personal information so you can fix your bugs. I don't see it being a valuable trade. I'll just find someone who can fix their bugs without tracking me.

>You are saying that you want to collect my personal information so you can fix your bugs.

How do you define personal information? Let's use Chrome as an example. Recording what website I visit is clearly personal information. What about recording how many tabs I have open, how much RAM each tab is using, and when each tab was last viewed? Is that personal information to you? I personally don't value keeping that private and it is probably a valuable piece of information that could help the developers improve what has been one of the biggest user complaints about Chrome since almost its release.

I think that is generally OP's point. Each piece of data exists on a spectrum in value for both the user and the developer. Data should be kept private when it has value to the user. There is little harm in sharing the data with the developer when the user would deem it low value and the developer would deem it high value.

It's pretty easy to understand what information is technically static and could be used to track you. Number of tabs: low possible range and pretty variable, even for tab hoarders, so it's low entropy information. Amount of RAM used in each open tab: that should be statistically significant and I'm pretty sure could be used to identify people if there are enough tabs open for a long enough period. When each tab was viewed: every (not-)clicked tab is a bit of information, you don't need much to narrow down a person. Interesting reading on de-anonymizing people on seemingly anonymized data: https://www.wired.com/2007/12/why-anonymous-data-sometimes-i...

Personal information is a bit nebulous. Do we consider the list of function calls in a stack trace "personal information"?

If I sent the stack trace to you, no. Otherwise, yes. It's my stack trace after all.

(Perhaps "private" not "personal" is a better term here, but stack traces can expose personal information too, if they include details about function arguments.)

For me, the point is really about control.

These companies know people don’t actively want to be surveilled which is why they sneak this shit in instead of being upfront about it.

If it was so great for consumers it would be an opt in not an opt out hidden behind a series of dark patterns.

Even Apple switches Siri back on after every OS upgrade.

+1 to this. As long as proper privacy concerns are addressed and the data gathering is imperceptible to the product experience, telemetry signals are immensely valuable for improving the product in a variety of ways.

Many users care more about their privacy than your product.

Certainly true, but it doesn't counter the original claim: Anonymized telemetry collection with proper privacy considerations can have a net positive impact on the product.

So why does $product need to send telemetry data via google? Why can highly complex software that runs most of the worlds internet infrastructure (linux) work without telemetry? Why is telemetry not opt-in or relies on reports in situation where a bug causes an issue like firefox crash reports? I'd rather have privacy and buggy software then bug free software in exchange for no privacy at all

>So why does $product need to send telemetry data via google?

Because Google is responsible for most of the software on said product. Who would be receiving that telemetry data if it wasn't Google?

>Why can highly complex software that runs most of the worlds internet infrastructure (linux) work without telemetry?

First, this is a false premise because it ignores the potential that telemetry could help improve this software but most Linux distros have decided against it for other reasons. Secondly, it ignores that some distros do in fact include telemetry.

>Why is telemetry not opt-in

It probably should be when it comes to something that has potential to invade privacy, but we have to be realistic that practically no one will actively turn on telemetry if it is initially set to off. That drastically decreases the value of the collected data and it basically turns into nothing more than something customer service can tell someone to turn on while trying to troubleshoot a specific issue.

>or relies on reports in situation where a bug causes an issue like firefox crash reports?

Telemetry isn't just about bugs. It is also about guiding future development, knowing what features are used, knowing the workflow for users, etc. It can provide value beyond crash reports.

>I'd rather have privacy and buggy software then bug free software in exchange for no privacy at all

This is completely fair. I would generally agree with you and bet that most HN readers would too. However this is not a binary choice. Not all telemetry is inherently bad. Not all loss of privacy is inherently damaging. This is a complicated issue that will involve compromises and anyone sticking to a complete extreme of it being all bad or all good isn't going to offer anything productive to this conversation.

> Because Google is responsible for most of the software on said product. Who would be receiving that telemetry data if it wasn't Google?

Depends, on Android maybe. On my Android Device, not really i don't use google software with the exception of the core android system without gplay services. On iOS, the HTML Based Web, or Desktop Systems, I see no need for google to exist. If you need telemetry, run your own damn telemtry server instead of feeding the FAANG Privacy nightmare even more.

> First, this is a false premise because it ignores the potential that telemetry could help improve this software but most Linux distros have decided against it for other reasons. Secondly, it ignores that some distros do in fact include telemetry.

Distros may, Linux itself does not. The fact that the majority of Linux Distros work just fine without telemetry shows that large scale software developement and deployment work just fine without invading peoples privacy needlessly.

> It probably should be when it comes to something that has potential to invade privacy, but we have to be realistic that practically no one will actively turn on telemetry if it is initially set to off.

so, if given the fair and free choice everyone will chose against telemetry? And that doesn't make you ask yourself "are we the baddies?".

> That drastically decreases the value of the collected data and it basically turns into nothing more than something customer service can tell someone to turn on while trying to troubleshoot a specific issue.

So, wheres the problem here? Sounds EXACTLY how a good telemetry system should work. If the bugs don't bother the users there's no need to invade their privacy to fix them, if they do bother them, telemetry can be a tool to help them. There's no need to generate "valuable data" except to invade peoples privacy.

> Telemetry isn't just about bugs. It is also about guiding future development, knowing what features are used, knowing the workflow for users, etc. It can provide value beyond crash reports.

Why is it any of your effing buisness what my workflow is like? If i need a feature i request it. This shit is only accepted because the majority of users lack a meaningful understanding of the depth of invasion by app and web developers into their privacy.

This argument does not hold because you can compare Google to Apple (in this case and based on the article) and say that if this was the case, then Apple which gathers less data would have inferior (more bugs, slow feature development, etc.) than Google. I see the competition, which is Apple in this case, doing relatively fair without (presumably) gathering as much data, therefore I absolutely don’t buy this claim.

> I'd rather have privacy and buggy software then bug free software in exchange for no privacy at all

Unfortunately, nobody offers bug free software in exchange for no privacy. It’s still buggy.

We’re increasing the risk exposure for every user for our own trivial convenience. It is inherently bad, just like other forms of widespread surveillance that is often motivated by some seemingly good cause, like catching terrorists.

Telemetry is inherently bad if it's not done with the informed, opt-in consent of the end user whose data it's (mis)appropriating, oftentimes silently.

There's no issue with opt-in telemetry, where the user says "yes, it's okay to track me".

Invisible, silent, always-on telemetry is actually just spyware that's been mislabeled.

Ultimately it's not the telemetry that's at issue: it's the unethical and selfish behavior of the software/device manufacturer.

No sane or reasonable person thinks that an EULA is informed consent.

Once upon a time fixing bugs in production didn't happen because the product got all the bugs out before production. If it had bugs in production, the product failed.

You used the phrase "once upon a time", a common opening for fairy tales, which seems apropos for describing a magical land where products achieved a 100% bug detection rate before release. I suppose this might have been true 50 years ago, at the dawn of the electronic calculator, but that is now an age of legend...

I've often wondered about this commonly repeated belief that software of ~30 years ago was less buggy than software today, because it doesn't really line up with my memories. There's definitely part of it that comes from a standard "back in my day", rose-tinted glasses sort of thing.

But I actually think a lot of it comes from the fact that modern software can be easily patched, whereas older software couldn't. It is easy to believe that software today is buggier because of just how many patches we get for it. But back in the day, any bugs that existed in the product were not as visible, because we weren't getting weekly updates where the patch notes say "Bug fixes."

How many massive vulnerabilities existed in major products of the day, and continued to persist unnoticed by all of us because of the relative impossibility of patching them out?

On top of that, modern software is simply more complex -- often times an order of magnitude more complex. (Whether this increased complexity is always needed/appropriate is a separate question.) I'm not sure what metric you would use to be able to do a "bugs per complexity unit" sort of comparison between then and now, something that attempts to control for increased complexity, but my intuition is that it would be pretty flat.

When that was true, several decades ago, products generally had upwards of 2 years of design/architecture/engineering effort and definitions prior to another 3-5 years of development.

It still (sometimes) happens for medical, aerospace and other transportation software that interfaces with hardware where safety is a concern.

The more concerning thing about the car data is that the manafacturers resell it to third parties and those third parties have the right to resell it again. It's a mess.

As a comparison, I don't know if much of Google's data ever leaves Google.

i'm getting the impression that iot providers have far, far lower privacy standards vs dedicated tech providers. This to me indicates that they don't take the internet capability of their kettles/cars seriously enough. It's just a gimmick. This is not a constructive way to advance iot.

Every data broker out there says a prayer every night that we (as a society) continue to focus our attention on Google (an absolute saint by comparison) and ignore what phone companies, cable companies, browser extensions, gaming apps, smart tvs, etc. etc. do with our data.

> This to me indicates that they don't take the internet capability of their kettles/cars seriously enough. It's just a gimmick.

Of course it is, and of course they don't. There are exactly two reasons why stuff like cars or kettles get connected to the Internet:

1) A value-add gimmick to justify a price hike on what's pretty much a commodity product;

2) A way to lock you into paying (with money or data) for a cloud service, using a physical appliance as an anchor.

Actual utility of an Internet-connected appliance doesn't even enter the picture.

I read Steven Levy's book "Hackers" recently. One interesting insight was that developers for Sierra On-line and other early publishers had deals for the developer to get a 30% royalty on the games they wrote, with Sierra collecting 70% as the publisher. Over time, as there was some market saturation in the early 80s, this number decreased.

> cars regularly send basic data

I'm still terrified by the fact that some cars now apparently have network interfaces for some reason.

Got a courtesy call from BMW the other day to let me know my brake fluid needed changing and would I like an appointment made at my nearest garage?

I get that there are privacy concerns, but also that's pretty cool. It also has GPS and will automatically alert BNW if air bags are deployed. Has saved lives.

> Got a courtesy call from BMW the other day to let me know my brake fluid needed changing and would I like an appointment made at my nearest garage?

That's only marginally better than it popping up an alert on the dashboard, which many modern cars most probably do anyway, but imo it feels like something of a privacy invasion.

> It also has GPS and will automatically alert BNW if air bags are deployed. Has saved lives.

Aren't there systems that automatically call an emergency number and send GPS coordinates when they detect a crash? I think I read somewhere that some countries are even going to mandate them on new cars.

(Disclaimer: I'm not much into cars. I do have a driving license, but I don't own a car and don't drive very often.)

Ideally some of that data can be aggregated and acted upon locally to the car computer, so that once an arbitrary car manufacturer closes shop, you can still retain the value provided by that telemetry.

Sending it off to their servers and having them manually call you up is nice, but I'd hate for that to suddenly go away because of some business that is outside of your control as a consumer.

We can save a lot of lives if we monitor everyone/everything. I'm sure there was very little early death in the Matrix universe.

Except there was a lot of death, hence the line about rejecting uptopia. Also robots used human brains as batteries (or processors, in the original script) which is not quiet the same.

It is like I tell my kids, "pointing to bad behavior does not justify your bad behavior"

Cities frequently do this when they want to raise fees or taxes, 'Hey look at City B and City C, our fees are still lower even with this unneeded and uncalled for increase'

>Cars only started doing this because phones made it normal. It's wrong in both cases.

I don't know that this is true, planes have been doing it for quite some time now, although obviously they existing in a totally different bracket of price and complexity.

although obviously they existing in a totally different bracket of price and complexity.

There's a whole world of difference between a plane operating commercial service in a highly-regulated industry and one's own car. At least there is an expectation of personal privacy - and some semblance of freedom - with the latter.

Apple didn’t establish the 30% cut. They kited the idea from console makers and other walled garden industries that came before them.

This doesn’t make it more defensible, but they didn’t create it.

It’s way worse. Google is the pioneer in that type of analytics.

Apple took the existing model and automated it. They didn’t invent it, it’s been around since RCA/Victor. Retail takes bigger cuts (Walmart used to get 60% from AV vendors). Enterprise software resellers and distributors take a similar share to Apple, and do other shenanigans as a financing mechanism. When you hear about “shipments” that’s what that means.

OT, but since you mentioned it, does anyone happen to know what the most recent model years without any kind of cellular radio might be?

In a similar vein, can the radios be physically removed from any newer cars without the car complaining about it?

Depends on the package you opt for, but I'd guess up to 2011 for cars without onstar

Wow, that's disheartening. Was hoping to hear at least 2014, heh.

Telemetry allows people to make better decisions. It's not a bad practice. Information deserves to be free.

Let's not forget that "better" is from the viewpoint of a giant corporation whose primary reason for existence is to suck as much profit out of you as it can...

Often the benefit is mutual. A better product is good for both the business and the users.

I wonder if they figured out the perfect "benign phrases" using a/b testing.

It's called the "tu quoque" logical fallacy

Such an important point.

And, as with most things, there’s an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/978/

I seriously don’t mean this in an offensive way. But isn’t bringing Apple now into this, “Whataboutism” in disguise?

>cars regularly send basic data

My car doesn't and I absolutely would never buy one that does even if that meant walking/taking the bus.

Which makes it weird that we accept this bullshit from our phones, considering that you have your phone with you whether you're driving or walking or taking the bus.

I think it's because you have to pay money to access the cell network; You need an identety to clear billing with. Until we have enough spectrum for WiFi to have longer ranges you will never be able to use a portable device with internet access like cell phones have without being tracked. The extra data exfiltrated from our devices is often only a little more precise than what the carriers in many places are already selling.

I don't accept it on my phone either.

My Oneplus runs Lineage, and I explicitly omitted Google services.

I had previously run the MicroG rewrap of Lineage, but the maintainer dropped maintenance for six months, so I found ways to do without the GMS emulation.

Alas, your cell carrier can and probably is still tracking everywhere you go, as well as who you call / text / calls you / texts you, and sniffing your packets unless you VPN

I also use microG on my phone.

"20X more telemetry", in terms of data usage, is a pretty meaningless statistic on its own (unless it's large enough to affect your mobile data cap or something).

For instance, I would consider it a much bigger privacy violation for my phone to transmit my exact location every hour than my current CPU usage every 10 seconds.

Which Apple is apparently doing - they send location, local IP, and nearby wifi mac addresses even when you're not logged in. Similarly Apple is collecting more data types than Google according to the research paper.

Please provide evidence of this because Apple's official documentation says otherwise:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203033

They do send nearly WiFi hotspots for crowd sourcing purposes but it is never in conjunction with your local IP address (which is an identifying piece of information).

It's in the article that we're in the thread for. Table 1[0]

[0] https://therecord.media/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Telemetry...

Did you read the OP article? The researchers clearly outline what apple is phoning home. They even made a nice clean table showing what apple and google are sending back to themselves.

I read the article and it's wrong.

Apple does not explicitly "send" the user's IP address. It naturally is accessible on their end as a result of the TCP/IP protocol. But Apple has made quite clear that it does not use that information in any way.

Nearby WiFi spots can be easily used to track device location. Here is a neat little project that does exactly that for IOT tracking [1].

[1] https://github.com/dmsl/anyplace

Nearby wifi hotspot location is the base for aGPS. Without it it would be slower and eat up more battery.

The wifi thing is fine/good IMO. It allows everyone to get their location without gps. It’s what let’s devices with no gps like the MacBook and ipad to get their current location. Google does the exact same thing although they used street view cars for the initial dataset.

Allowing wifi mac addresses, ssids, bssids, etc. of leased equipment in combination with subscriber address/goelocation to be shared or otherwise disclosed to third party affiliates, partners, agencies is a requirement included in the fine print of some residential ISP's agreement terms I've read, fwiw.

I assumed that this probably is implemented as a 'non-public' goelocation service api as well raw data sharing agreements in some cases, but I'd doubt the data 'processors' and 'controllers' are known to anyone outside those parties.

I was also surprised by the emphasis on "20x more data" aspect. The table on kinds-of-data sent was showing Apple in a much more negative light.

The article is surprisingly short on details. E.g., Google does know your location and the Wifi APs, it's just not the OS that sends it.

Sending telemetry can get expensive: in situations where bandwidth/throughput is restricted people often get picky about giving PCs with Windows installed internet access because of this. It can be bad even in normal situations: My girlfriend's laptop has so much broken telemetry crap between Microsoft and HP that her applications actually get pushed into swap (or whatever it's called on Windows.)

Sending telemetry _poorly_ can get expensive. A good client can aggregate, even compress locally, and publish telemetry in batches. Let's not rule out telemetry entirely because of bad implementations.

I'd say the moral of the story here is that Microsoft and HP just write shitty software.

Not mentioned in the headline: When the user is _not_ logged in, iOS collects "location" whereas Android does not.

I am actually a little surprised that iOS would gather this information. What use would it serve?

It's possible this is referring to this feature: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/apple-explains-mysteriou...

Generally speaking, Apple is drastically better about location services privacy. For instance, Apple Maps does not tie any location data nor direction requests to your Apple ID, and regularly rotates identifiers for devices used by the service: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212039

That link is returning "429 Too Many Requests." What feature is it you're referring to?

There's an Ultra Wideband radio in the iPhone 11 and newer that isn't legal to use in all countries. Apple uses a location request sometimes just to determine if the device can legally run that radio or not.

If that's the case, they wouldn't need to report the location back to themselves, would they? The phone would simply check its coordinates, and turn it on or off.

Thanks!

It's nice of you to accept Apple's calling it "radio" but UWB is radar technology. Newer iPhones have radar built into them to make their location tracking more precise. Most people don't understand (or can't understand) the details, which is why the semantic load of calling UWB "radar" instead of "radio" is important for conveying its intended purpose.

Find My Phone? It is a choice to enroll in this, and it’s mighty convenient when you lose or get your phone stolen.

No, it's the location it uses to report to Apple Maps for the purposes of improving traffic.

Much, much more than traffic, though that is useful. The anonymized probe data is used to refine business driveways inferred from satellite imagery, for example. That’s why suddenly Maps can often route you to the correct parking lot instead of a nearby curb. Think about it: if you know a phone is navigating to Safeway, where the user stops navigation is potentially interesting in aggregate and divulges almost nothing except the average parking preference of an iOS user.

Source: Worked on that. One example of hundreds.

Presumably it could wait until someone actually asks for the phone's location in that case. No need to report the location if no one's asked for it.

That works when you're not logged in?

One of the services Apple generally provides is that a phone is locked to a given Apple ID, such that if you wipe it, it still knows it belongs to a given owner, and you need to unlock that for someone else to activate it. It wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest Apple would want Find My iPhone to work even after it's reset.

That being said, my theory is in another comment.

Can you even imagine? Lost your phone? Did you make sure that you were logged in before you lost it? Did the thief reset the phone and log you out? Oh, guess you can't find your phone now. Sorry.

Once you’re signed in you stay signed in and you can’t sign out without authenticating. Resetting the phone doesn’t bypass this.

Yes, when your phone is locked, but only if you've logged the phone into your iCloud account.

> When the user is _not_ logged in

Does this matter? How many people do you know that aren't logged in on their phones? It is literally one the first things Android asks you to do even before showing you the main screen.

I also found this to be an almost useless case to examine. The number of people not-logged-in must be infinitesimal.

I didn’t think iOS even lets you past the welcome screen without signing in.

iOS setup encourages you to sign in or create an account if necessary. Skipping is also an option.

Might be for crowd sourcing open wifi location data.

Find my iphone?

This is for logged-out. I believe find-my-iphone is only for users logged into their iCloud accounts.

You are correct, Find My … only works if you’re signed in with an Apple ID to iCloud.

> When the user is _not_ logged in, iOS collects "location" whereas Android does not.

This may be only technically true. It's not Android, it's Google Play Services, which collects "anonymized", high-accuracy[1] location data constantly.

[1] Yeah, that's actually a contradiction-in-terms. There is no such thing as anonymized, high-accuracy location data.

What does login state have to do here? The controls for device analytics are available and controllable separately from any login state.

You really expect the headline to list out arbitrary specific examples?

It doesn’t seem like they actually “collect” this information with any identifier and only use it for limited strict purposes. This is unlike google who can pop up a map of everywhere you’ve been minute by minute over the last 5 years. I guess that’s only when you’re logged in to your google account, but that’s 99% of Android phones.

I only skimmed the paper, but I think the title extracts and confuses a small part of the paper: "Google collects around 20 times more handset data than Apple" They didn't intend to say that google collects 20x more data than apple in total, which is what the use of the term "devices" kinda leads us to think. The paper seemed to be equally critical of both and this article made it into an attack on google.

Idk which device is worse, but this article title is a bit misleading. Why not just quote the paper directly?

As users, we are assured that telemetry is only for the purpose of "improving products and services", "improving user experience", etc. If one company is collecting 20x as much as another, all else being equal, one would expect that this would be reflected in the quality of the product/service/experience.

Of course, Google's service is to advertisers, first and foremost. Users generally do not pay for what they receive from Google. Perhaps Google's paying customers, advertisers, are the ones seeing the improvement in the quality of service as a direct or indirect result of telemetry.

YMMV, but as much as I like Apple Maps and use it as much as I can, for the more complex/unknown routes I definitely rely more on Google Maps to get it right. I don't know if telemetry is the cause for the better service, but it is noticeably better for me.

Separately, I'm also a google customer as I run an Ad campaign for a small business (skilled labor), and the dollars spent on search ads are extremely efficient with an incredible ROI. Even with CACs in the 10s of dollars, with the size of the contracts being signed it typically costs much less than .5% of the total.

Just quickly comparing Apple Maps and Google Maps:

There is no Apple Maps web page. With Google I can do a complex route plan on my PC and my phone will have the "recent searches" in it ready to go when I get in the car.

Apple Maps doesn't show how packed the trains are. Google Maps shows me how full individual train carriages are!

Apple Maps can't provide cycling directions in my area (a world city!), Google can.

Apple Maps routinely provides driving time estimates that are 2x longer or 2x shorter than the actual time. The Google maps estimation error is more like 5-10% instead of 100%!

Google Maps has a trustworthy "star" review score for local restaurants. Anything that's mid-4s or higher with over a hundred reviews is definitely worth going to. For a popular local cafe Apple maps shows the worthless Tripadvisor score with just 16 votes. Google shows its own data with 357 votes.

Etc...

Consider trying https://openstreetmap.org, too.

I've found it varies by area to area. I switched from iOS to Android about a year ago and I miss Apple Maps. Apple's mapping and navigation is better here in New Zealand compared to Google. Overseas I've found that different services have strengths/weaknesses in different cities/areas.

This must be a recent change because it used to be awful about 4 years ago. Regularly try and take me through roads that hadn't existed for a decade. Maybe worked around the city, but not outside or commercial areas.

I don't think this is necessarily true. I believe that Google Maps navigation and location accuracy is significantly better on Android than iOS (no claim on 20x...but anectdatally better)

Google Maps getting more precise telemetry data is actually so useful in improving the navigation experience in tricky intersections, overlapping roads, or low bandwidth areas where GPS signal and service can be spotty. I can speak from experience that friends with Android phones experience less jumpiness in their GPS location, less errors in navigation, and less of that pesky "You've Arrived" notification triggering when still far away from the destination.

Also anecdotally speaking, conversely, I used to use Waze/Google Maps, and nowadays just use Apple Maps. The latter has been more than sufficient in my day to day travels. I can't think of any errors in navigation.

If telemetry is used for improving services then why does every project who's UI decisions are based on telemetry[1] consistently rebuild their UIs in less usable and less user friendly ways?

[1] Pretty much anything from Mozilla or Google, Reddit, lots of others.

Because they're optimizing for some engagement metric and not user experience.

Power users turn off telemetry and skew data?

You bet they are improving. I don’t know any big vendor who is worse than google in ux. Another question is, where is the good old “hiring few hundred users from different groups and watching what they do with a test device” instead of spying on millions of the same kind.

A lot of this reveals the way that Google itself perceives Android devices, and also ChromeOS devices to a lesser extent, to be inside their infrastructure. Years ago Google SRE wanted to extend observability beyond their edge so that there could be an SRE team responsible for the performance of first-party mobile applications. So, there's an SRE team at Google with a dashboard that shows them Google search latency from Google app v42 and v43 which is deployed to 1% of clients. This is why there is so much telemetry.

Another big thing about Android is anti-abuse, keeping people from running ad click fraud in apps running on emulators. That is the whole DroidGuard thing that the paper mentions and doesn't explore further. It is a device-specific virtual machine and bytecode for the virtual machine which is intended to authenticate it as a real device, not an emulator.

Anyway check out this slide deck for how Google SRE views mobile as being in their world: https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/conference/protec...

PS that team is called MISRE, pronounced "misery" and some of the founders of that team migrated from "SAD SRE" make of that what you will.

> A lot of this reveals the way that Google itself perceives Android devices, and also ChromeOS devices to a lesser extent, to be inside their infrastructure.

This quote should be more than enough to justify legally separating Google from ownership of both platforms. It is a similar problem we're seeing Tesla now extend to it's cars. Regardless of who legally owns the device, the company's employees feel entitled to data from it and de facto ownership of it. In most cases collecting data that the actual owner of the device is unable to see or utilize themselves.

Not all of it is inaccessible to users. CPU profiles of ChromeOS, for example, are collected on user devices, aggregated, and checked into the public source code repos where anyone can use them, usually for optimizing a chromium build but any purpose you can think of.

You sure you don’t mean SWE? SREs care about reliability

Every week there's a story here on HN that makes me mourn the demise of the Nokia N900. Still the best smartphone ever made by a massive margin.

I hope both those things are made obsolete by stories of smartphones that work well and are vastly more trustworthy than Google and Apple. The longer it takes, the harder it gets. Whatsapp/Signal ports are now hard requirements for much of the population. :S

But what about Librem 5 and Pinephone?

yeah, about them. Don't we all want them to go on to succeed as well as the n900? Then better. Want that badly. Or anything else similar. Not yet though, huh?

> Not yet though, huh?

Depends on your needs. Calls, texts, browsing work pretty reliably. Convergence has been demonstrated, too. Your Android banking app forced on you may work or not depending on luck.

Smartphones are personal tracking devices that also allow you to browse the web and make phone calls.

I've always thought of them as "endpoints for deploying cooperate software into your life" but this is also a pretty good description.

The iPhone is basically a vending machine for entertainment, owned by Apple and paid for by you.

Often it is a slot machine as well.

In addition to size of the data transmission being a poor measure of privacy implications (XML versus JSON anyone?), this paragraph is nonsense: "The University of Dublin professor says that this expansive data collection raises at least two major concerns. First, that the telemetry can be used to link physical devices to personal details, data that both companies are most likely exploiting for advertising purposes."

Apple doesn't have an advertising business, nor does it share that information with advertisers.

Apple supposedly makes billions every year from ad revenue. Not a core part of their business but still nothing to sneeze at

In addition to https://searchads.apple.com there's ads in the stock and news apps.

From the study[0]...

"Several pre-installed system apps make regular network connections that share device identifiers and details ... The Clock app connects to Google Analytics ssl. google-analytics.com/batch."

Really, the clock app calls analytics on a regular basis. That is just ridiculous.

[0]-https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf

What are the best alternatives to iOS and Android? Is it reasonable to consider the hardware itself "safe", given that the software tracks and calls home about every single thing it does? What are the alternatives?

There are no practical alternatives.

If you're serious enough to use impractical solutions, you probably want a non-google Android distro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_custom_Android_distrib...

As mentioned in sibling comment, there are no alternative, but I use microG, which is an open source Google Play Services (the core vehicle of most of this fuckery) shim that allows you to use apps that require Google Play Services (like Uber or Tinder or whatever) without actually having to install any binary blobs from Google. The future is so stupid.

There's /e/ OS for one. Debatable how far you get from the Google ecosystem, since it's an AOSP fork, but I think it's a fine middle ground of functionality and practical privacy.

The hardware itself is insecure in 99% of modern phones because the modem has its own tiny CPU with access to the main CPU and memory. I have no evidence that anyone does use this to collect your data, but somebody totally could. Desktop processors have something similar called the Intel Management Engine or AMD Ryzen has the PSP

Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, Sailfish OS, Nemo Mobile, postmarketOS. I use UT as my main smartphone OS and it does everything I need.

Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5.

Manjaro Phosh edition on the Pinephone is pretty good these days. There's still a lot of work to be done, but it works just fine as a phone.

None of the distributions on the PinePhone work well for all the things that people use that little computer in their pocket (which is no longer just a phone) for. For maps, for instance, all of the PinePhone's choices are little more than lightweight tech demos compared to, say, OSMAnd on Android. There is no official Signal client, no powerful browser beyond the clunky Desktop-Firefox-for-Postmarket-OS hack, etc.

It is unlikely that "all the work that would need to be done" to make the PinePhone as useful as an Android phone (even with pure libre software) will even get done. The problem is that the PinePhone is just too underpowered in CPU and RAM, comparable to devices from many years ago. Plus, the PinePhone dev community just doesn’t appear to be large and motivated enough to cover all the bases of e.g. battery optimization that the corporate mobile developers have done.

Well it can make calls, transfer data over cellular networks, and access a web browser. For some people, that's all they need. For maps, I use Nextcloud Maps through Firefox. You can also use Google Maps that way or whatever OSM provider. It comes with a Telegram client and Matrix client.

>no powerful browser beyond the clunky Desktop-Firefox-for-Postmarket-OS hack, etc.

I don't really know what you mean by this. It's the exact same Firefox that's in desktop Linux. You can install all the add-ons and such. Do note that Manjaro is not PostmarketOS.

The biggest problems are the weak CPU as you've mentioned, and the fact that the entire OS is in a very alpha (or even pre-alpha) state right now.

> For some people, that's all they need.

History tells us that when you have a device that does a few things that only for a tiny minority of people – within already a tiny minority of nerds – are "all that they need", and the dev community is so small, there is no future to the device. For someone who was around in the OpenMoko and Nokia N900 days, it is hard not to see the PinePhone as a stillborn device, which will never progress beyond "pre-alpha" state. A year after I got my PinePhone, it remains just as disappointing an experience as in the beginning.

> You can also use Google Maps that way or whatever OSM provider.

Browsing Google Maps is a joke on the PinePhone's weak processor. And again, OSM on the PinePhone is vastly inferior to the OSM choices on Android. Merely showing OSM tiles does not a good map app make.

> It's the exact same Firefox that's in desktop Linux

And that is the problem. Desktop Firefox was never designed to work at those screen dimensions. Many features of the Firefox UI do not actually work on the PinePhone. (They might possibly work if you dock the PinePhone with a monitor and mouse – I haven’t checked – but they don’t work on the PinePhone as a phone.)

Here I am still waiting for my Purism Librem 5 I ordered in 2019 while google continues to suck up my data.

Any day now...

Could an admin please adjust the typo in the title? Goolgle -> Google

The OP can also edit the title for a period of time after submission.

How to fully disable Google location tracking on your smartphone:

https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/10/08/how-to-fully-disabl...

How to disable personalized ads on Android:

https://www.androidguys.com/tips-tools/how-to-disable-person...

> Note that if you clear your cache, you will lose your opt-out setting.” Tap OK to continue and implement the change.

Which cache is that talking about, the browser, or some system level thing? Doesn't clearing your cache break some of their fingerprinting and tracking stuff (timing side channels, etc.)? Seems kind of egregious to have clearing that simultaneously opt you back in.

PSA: This does NOT stop Google tracking your smartphones location. If you think taking these steps means Google's blissfully unaware of where your smartphone is located is denying themselves reality, there are many, many ways to track where a handset is at any given moment (IP address, cellular tower location, with 5G it can be even more precise).

I'd be shocked if after turning off all the settings on my phone it was impossible to track its location via some capability somewhere.

Last week my Pixel started to display an overlay with closed captions of the audio flowing through the device.

It listens in on any audio and transcribes it. Probably handy for podcasts, but other things are just scary.

Maybe it's OK if Google does it, I don't really know. I dislike it, it concerns me. The device would have a transcription of audio conversations I have through apps like WhatsApp. Or it could do something useful like transcribe podcasts and hand the transcription over to the owners, so that they can publish it along with their podcasts, without Google needing to dedicate their servers to it.

But if companies like Xiaomi get this feature for free on Android 15 or 16, I know what they will use this tech for. I know what Facebook would use this tech for, and I wouldn't be surprised if they finally start to sell a cheap but powerful Android device.

With offline transcription the "your device is recording me" will get so much harder to detect, as no audio will get streamed. It will become so easy to listen for keywords like "lawnmower" and count their occurrences or their proximity to phrases like "need to buy", or "is pregnant" and stuff like that.

I don't want my devices to do this.

When you enabled the Live Caption (similarly to how folks told you to disable it --- on my phone it was turned off by default) the following informational screen should have been displayed:

"Live Caption detects speech on your device and automatically generates captions.

When speech is captioned, this feature uses additional battery. All audio and captions are processed locally and never leave the device. Currently available in English only."

So note that Google does not get a copy of the audio stream. It stays local to your device only. I don't know about you, but seems like a really handy feature to me, especially for those who might have hearing difficulties.

The live transcription behavior is enabled by a button at the bottom of the volume control toggle. If it transcribes even if that button is off that seems a lot more concerning.

I don't think transcribing on device and then uploading would make any sense: for something like podcasts they could just do serverside transcription (they already do for youtube videos at least).

1) press volume down

2) you should see the volume dialog with a box with squiggly lines in it at the bottom of the volume slider

3) press that to turn it off

Thanks to both of you.

Can you see how this feature might be useful for those with hearing problems? everything is not malicious..:

I'm waiting for a traffic analysis to turn up that Google gathers location, wifi APs and cell towers even when all possible consent is revoked. Because, with Google's greed, no way I'm believing that they would give that up, and I'm not turning the location service on.

Reminder that Google literally provides a location database for US cops, who are getting bulk data on people simply being in some place at some time and doing nothing wrong: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/technology/google-sensorv... Meanwhile other countries want to make Google store that data on their territory when it's about their citizens.

“The University of Dublin professor says that this expansive data collection raises at least two major concerns. First, that the telemetry can be used to link physical devices to personal details, data that both companies are most likely exploiting for advertising purposes.

Second, that the telemetry collection process allows the OS makers to track users’ location based on the IP address that connects and uploads device telemetry to their servers.

The researcher said that currently, there are very few, if any, realistic options for users to prevent telemetry collection from their devices.”

This is not what I signed up for, makes me want to leave my smartphone at home or in a faraday cage powered off so I’m not being triangulated by cell towers or these ubiquitous telemetry logs.

One thing I noticed is that Google does not collect location and nearby MACs by default and Apple does. That's a pretty serious difference IMO. And one I didn't expect.

Some skips the device's own MAC but they already know that anyway as they manufactured it.

By "Some" I meant "Apple". Autocorrect (swiping) with my fat fingers :P

"Google and Apple both collect a lot more telemetry from devices with Android/iOS respectively devices then they should be; with Google outdoing Apple."

There, fixed that title for you.

You can turn "location" off on Android just as you can turn "third party cookies" off on the Chrome browser. Google counts on 95% of users not doing that. Neither of these are perfect solutions but they do help a lot for minimal effort.

EDIT And this just in, more third party cookies:

     https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/google-testing-its-controversial-new-ad-targeting-tech-millions-browsers-heres

There is no point defending Apple or Google. Both of them probably collect data. Personally I'd be more comfortable with Apple collecting my data as they don't have an Advertisement based model. They've less incentives to use our data, whereas Google's business is based around that very idea! Apple advocates privacy and has made many features available as part of the IOS to enable very granular level control.

Both Google and Apple forbid health agencies around the world wanting to install apps to store similar data for the purposes of pandemic data and suppression - which is understandable that many governments would use it for all sorts of nefarious reasons, but it's also rather hypocritical that they can infer that 'we can use it for whatever because quality. And advertising'.

Some anecdotal from the Apple camp.

I've switch off every possible toggle on Apple TVs, iPhones MacBooks and all the devices still ping back to Apple HQ with time.apple.com, time-osx.g.aaplimg.com, metrics.icloud.com..... so I take this with a grain of salt. I've logged all DNS - using nextdns - and the number of requests back to HQ is more that it should be.

Approaching this constructively - is it possible that this data is used for verification purposes? E.g. iOS will alert your iCloud account if it detects a new IMEI/phone number?

The claim of “20x more data” is a bit suspect as well. 20x the byte-level amount of data? Yes, the math checks out. 20x the data points? Likely not.

Well I have a different personal email account and a different google phone account. There used to be more android mail apps that allow logging in directly without using the phone’s credentials but its getting more and more rare. Any Android mail apps suggestionsthat use web login than android are welcome

Google makes money by collecting data (and lately, cloud services), Apple makes money by selling hardware and putting huge margin on it. (And lately, cloud services.)

So it's all not surprising, really? Different business models lead to different outcomes.

I'd be interested to learn more. E.g, to what extent is the data anonymized?

I also want to know what the data is used for and how long it is stored for, but I suppose those are very tough questions for an external researcher to test.

It's all the little needling ways that get to me. For example, Google Maps works fine with GPS. However, if you drag the map view so it isn't centered on you and tap the "center" button, you get a pop-up begging you to let Google scan for access points even when your wifi is turned off. Hit no and hit the center button again and it works normally.

Fucking why, Google? It's irrelevant to the function I'm trying to use. Not only that but you already have my answer, which is no. Maybe I don't want to be your personal 24/7 wardriver. Maybe I don't want you running my battery down for no reason. Maybe I'm somewhere I'm not allowed to emit 2.4GHz signals and your scanning could get me in trouble with my job or even the law.

I got a feeling the only reason here is that Google is a search engine/ad business and Apple isn't.

Data collection is what companies do when they have no empathy. It's like an ivory tower effect where you don't interact with customers day to day or don't know what they want, so you try to use data to fill in the (large) gap. I could come up with countless examples of amazing products where nobody was using data to justify their decisions.

That's because the user of the service or device is not the customer.

If you're saying they are the product, that's a very old trope and easily falsified. For example, advertisers come to Facebook because, and only because, users are there. If users stopped liking Facebook, they wouldn't be there anymore. If they aren't there anymore, advertisers don't want to be there either. Thus, Facebook is incentivized to keep users happy - they are the most important people to Facebook. From what I've heard, Facebook struggles to get engineers to work on ads. If advertisers were the true customers, I imagine most engineers would be more gung-ho to work on ads because that would align more closely with career success at the company.

The above doesn't justify unrestrained tracking of user activity - but let's not pretend companies get to where they are because they create a first-class space for advertisers. They get to where they are because they, at least at one point, created a great product for their customers.

So they have 20x better informed decisions in their development processes then. Good!

Might I suggest Lineage OS. Very little if any data is sent out from my testing.

I would wager that a good share of it would be device vendor related telemetry

shouldn't be sending any. need a pure Linux phone to deal with Google

I guess this is interesting but it's comparing trash with garbage

Just to be clear the actual paper mentions Android exactly zero times.

Why do they need IMEI for? and mac addresses of close networks (besides location).

When the user gives consent for PII like IMEI, location, networks mac addresses?

I wonder if both companies might be breaching the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule ("COPPA").

You'd have to ask Apple, but I'd imagine they would say they use it to improve location services. Access point / MAC address data is really useful in aggregate as a way of augmenting GPS, especially indoors. And of course it's also a great way of seeing who associates with each other, but that's at least somewhat mitigated by most devices broadcasting random MAC addresses until they actually join a network.

There is a typo in the title. It should be Google and not Goolgle.

It's a long often too verbose read by "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" is unforgiving in its detailing of the past, and relentless in its fear of what the future likely holds.

Most people seem to say "oh I know they're collecting data." Unfortunately they don't - likely can't - grasp the depth and breadth. And the motive? Most will never make it that far.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism rips off the bandaid, one greepy greedy power move at a time.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

Not sure if I agree with the author.

For example, the phones send tons of data to Google when first booted. But there is no data on the phone at that point! Then maybe this is not data gathering just bad software??

There IS a lot of data even at the very first boot: unique device ID, IP address, MAC address, location, SSID, etc. It can be used to track you later on.

Thats like 1K data in total

But it's very sensitive data.

Google - if you're explaining you're losing

You are the Product.

It’s always interesting how Android is given the benefit of the doubt on intent and that never happens with iOS.

Seems like the answer is to use just iOS and apple products if you care about privacy.

and microsoft probably collects 200X from windows...

I wrote about CompatTelRunner because of the CPU time it consumes, which even MS employees like Billy O'Neal complain about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Desktop_Analytics

Google needs to be reined in. They're running wild. Too arrogant, too powerful, too much influence. And actively evil.

Most of the info Apple sends shouldn't be considered telemetry though.

The hardware info is used to make sure that blacklisted/stolen devices are rendered inoperable.

The other requests are simply due to used apps...it seems the researcher is unclear about many aspects of iOS. i.e. typing a url into Safari kicks off to find links, apps, etc. that will be the logical next step for a "search"

He also doesn't understand the difference between Siri the voice assistant and Siri the platform.

tldr; Google vacuums everything it can...Apple is the exact opposite.

This is precisely why I always choose to use the mobile version of a site/app rather than the app if it's available.

Safari has great adblocking. Also, the mobile version of a site is typically a superior UX compared to apps because the controls are consistent. It's usually faster, and best of all, it's MUCH easier to block all of the tracking.

I went to visit an apartment to rent with a friend. While waiting for the owner my friend was reading the names on the mailbox, and read the "x" out loud said "this person is probably Romanian". I when I was home I had notification if I knew this "x" person. All this time my phone was in my pocket. It is just creepy and I'm going to change my pixel 2 as soon as I can for an Iphone.

I mean at this point it's obvious if you're using a digital device data is going to be collected, that's part of society and living in the 21st century; could be your toothbrush, fridge, washing machine, car...All these devices generate data that is going to be collected.

It's also changing how crime is investigated; Google can be asked for a list of smartphones in an area at a given time, can be used to collect evidence or information (were you in this building on this floor at this time?). Carrying a smartphone can implicate you (or not) and you can be photographed by anyone at any moment regardless of your "rights".

I think people need to understand you are responsible for what you do on a computer; your clicks, searches, taps, installed app list, and basically everything is being recorded regardless of consent (which appears to be an illusion these days).

This is neither shocking nor unexpected. Humans generate data, data is going to be collected and used.

That's not going to change any time soon. Some thought Google would introduce a similar privacy feature to Apple's tracking consent but I lol'd at anyone who believed that.

>I think people need to understand you are responsible for what you do on a computer; your clicks, searches, taps, installed app list, and basically everything is being recorded regardless of consent (which appears to be an illusion these days).

While I agree with this in principle, I've never really understood why we forgive poor user behaviour when it comes to computers when we don't do the same with basically any other tool humans regularly use, despite the negative consequences being comparable, I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to just quietly accept 'tracking's just the way it is, deal with it.'

That doesn't come down to poor user behaviour in that case, it comes down to malicious behaviour by device manufacturers and software developers in the name of profit.

It's all well and good to expect users to take steps to deal with that behaviour, but it shouldn't just be accepted that, 'that's just the way it is.' And companies should be held accountable for at least the deceit that surrounds it.

Just being honest and open about it all would be a start. At least then you could make the excuse 'oh well the user should have tried harder to not be tracked.' Because they have a fair chance of knowing where and how they're being tracked.

This current system of deceit and bullshit is the problem.

The point of the comparison made in the headline here is exactly that one does not need to expect the worse from everyone and therefore stop caring and complaining.

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