Comment on Apple calls Android a 'massive tracking device'
ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world 1 year agoFrom what I’ve heard it’s been harder for law enforcement to get into Android phones now.
Also, the whole privacy features only make Apple’s data gathering more valuable because they become the only ones that can access that information. Google caught on and is doing the same thing with their privacy features. Like privacy features are nice, but it’s naive to think that Apple and Google don’t have other ulterior motives with implementing them.
Apple being an american company, what’s to stop high level surveilance from demanding backdoor access and printing out a letter of non-disclosure as per current US laws?
It would be negligent of any intel agency with the possibility to not make their own Room 641A at Apple.
The government can't compel them to actually lie, and under their current public disclosures, they do not do such things. At any rate, demands are not unlimited in scope; US law doesn't require them to secretly re-architect the whole service to create a backdoor from scratch. AT&T willingly built 641A.
To say they are part of it kind of implies they even had a choice. When Yahoo tried to fight being a part of the program they were going to be fined $250k a day.
From what I’ve heard it’s been harder for law enforcement to get into Android phones now.
Don’t need to just call up Google and get whatever they want. In fact they get whatever they want for thousands of people at a time.
Only for things that are on Google’s servers. If you have something that’s on-device police will use something like Cellbrite to access it.
The vast majority of stuff Google has on their servers isn’t really all that useful to law enforcement anyway and Google requires a search warrant before handing it over. And they generally notify the user when it happens (when legally allowed to do so). Most useful would probably be location data, but law enforcement can also get similar information from cell phone companies (who are much more carefree about handing over subscriber data).
Google and Apple are both actually kind of a pain to deal with for warrant related stuff. In my line of work, I most often see subpoenas for cell phone and social media records as those are much easier to get.
People often act like Google is just handing out user user data to the highest bidder, but that really misunderstands their profit model. They are very protective of user data. Google does not like to give it out so that only they can be the ones to profit off of the data.
Only for things that are on Google’s servers.
Everything is on Google’s servers.
People often act like Google is just handing out user user data to the highest bidder
Yeah, I realize it’s worse than that… When did I say otherwise? I even started off the comment by stating that Apple and Google’s privacy features were made for anti-competitive reasons, not to benefit the consumer.
Your type of fear-mongering isn’t really helpful though. It just makes people feel powerless to large corporations and makes people try to address the wrong issues. It’s important to accurately state what they are collecting and how they are using that data. We spent a decade complaining about Google not respecting privacy and selling data and what we got was Google gaining even more power. Because, that wasn’t what Google was doing or their end goal.
Norgur@kbin.social 1 year ago
Exactly! As if Apple would hesitate even one cycle of their M3 CPUs to establish a monopoly through "data protection" (aka "only we can sell access to your data to others")