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Comment by arsome | Hacker News Reader

But again, they also have system privileges on your phone and if they wanted to dump location data or bluetooth scans they could do so trivially.

About the worst that could come of this is an accidental capture in a crash report.

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So maybe Google shouldn't have guaranteed privacy of this app on a phone OS where such a promise is impossible to deliver?

What type of guarantees did they promise?

Basically any device can be seen as compromised if anyone malicious had hardware or root access - including the manufacturer. If you don't trust your manufacturer, you have far bigger problems than bluetooth IDs in the log.

But that's just it. I DON'T trust Google one iota.

Then if you have an Android phone, you have no reason to believe your location data is private from Google, with or without the contact tracing app.

I'm not saying this isn't a problem, I'm in the same boat here, just that the contact tracing app doesn't really add to it.

Then you shouldn’t have an Android device. This isn’t complicated.

I don't have an Android device presicely because of this. I don't use Google Chrome, search, etc. I block all GA,Tagmanager,blahblahblah as well.

Great, this “issue” is irrelevant to you and your off-topic rant adds exactly nothing to this discussion of a clearly defined risk. For other people who have made a relevant device choice, the point stands that it’s a non-issue since there’s no additional risk.

Hardly. Your privacy also depends on what devices your neighbors use. Bluetooth/Wifi/etc packet broadcast, etc. Apple does _some_ things to midigate privacy risks for their users, but not enough.

This. My wireless networks, MAC addresses etc are collected on Google's end by my neighbors' Google devices for things like advanced location tracking.

But note that now Apple has fake mac addresses (for wifi though) for this reason.

Google's advanced location tracking logs access point ESSIDs and MAC addresses. Whatever Apple is doing won't stop that.

As someone in a similar boat without an android, I think it adds to the discussion. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside to see such rants.

Actually, Google and Apple teamed up on a contact tracing concept. Even when it was first annouced, the fact that G was attached meant that I wasn't interested. Apple's involvement only lessened the distrust slightly to me, but not enough for me to want to bother with it.

The only option you have is a phone like the Nokia 3310 then. Android and iOS are equally bad, just in different quantities of bad in different areas.

In regards to privacy they are not equally bad. And for this contact tracing app they aren’t equally bad.

They are equally bad just in different ways to different people.

Just like a Nokia. Do any manufacturers even make their own OS anymore?

buy an iphone?

I consider Facebook malicious, and I've just learnt that their pre-installed app basically has root on my Android.

How is that not the story here?

No, the Facebook app most likely does not have any special permissions. These are typically granted by manufacturers based on their own signing keys.

How are you even remotely surprised by that? If you are expecting any privacy or security from a combo of Facebook and Android, you've been asleep for the last 13 years.

A preinstalled fb app does not have any special permissions.

This seems like saying they shouldn't have guaranteed privacy because someone could be looking over your shoulder while you type your password. Maybe that's true, but it also seems like a uselessly impractical way to interpret things.

I imagine for semi-criminal actors, injecting code or "accidentally" using systen data, are still two different scenarios. I mean, state actors could also just follow you around, or place agents as friends and family... so why bother about anything?

> About the worst that could come of this is an accidental capture in a crash report.

So.. this data is exposed and available even though they said would/could never leak. Seems pretty cut and dry to me. It is a black and white issue. Accidental disclosure is still a disclosure.

It's accidental exposure to someone who already had root and could record the data themselves.

I think there's a practical difference between what an app could do with root permissions and what is widely understood to be likely or acceptable. The "anything the app could do it is doing" model isn't really the right model to apply for vendor apps that are generally trusted by consumers (and observed by security researchers). We're not talking malware with root; we're talking the regular system health and monitoring apps that vendors install.

So it's real unlikely that MotoCare is intentionally trying to de-anonymize someone's COVID-19 data by code injection or continuous GPS logging. It is extremely likely and expected that the app is periodically grabbing the syslog as a crash report, and that means Google's claim of keeping your data private now has to implicitly assume that MotoCare, without doing anything special other than its regular behavior, is also keeping your data private. That's not a claim Google should be implicitly making on behalf of MotoCare (let alone on behalf of every app that could hypothetically be installed on your system and is understood to be well-behaved in the sense that it just reads the syslog).

It's really incumbent on a privacy-protecting application to not put private data in the syslog. If it's in the syslog, it's not private (even though it's more private than, say, a notification on the homescreen).

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