I’m talking about things like approximate location, file/album specific media access, system wide camera and mic access, camera/mic use indicator, permission logs, data safety page for apps in play store etc.
Who are they trying to fool here? Any person who is truly aware about privacy knows Google cannot trusted in this domain. I don’t believe Google just decided to turn ‘not evil’ in one night and bring all these additions that actually have any impact on us end users. Google might just as well have the same access to our devices’ data if not more and they wouldn’t mind letting third party apps have access to it. Operating at such a humongous scale globally, being the lifeline of nearly all individuals and industries and predating off them as their primary source of revenue, they have complete power to ignore or silence the privacy minded individuals like us, yet they bothered to implement and provide us these features.
I cannot come up with any reasonable answer for this apart from what I think of this as some sort of publicity stunt to compare themselves with the privacy features Apple introduced in their softwares. What are your thoughts?
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You realize Android is open-source and you can actually audit that all those features actually do what they claim to do, right?
Principle of least privilege is a good thing, even with Google’s apps. Maybe Google can get all that data from elsewhere, sure, but it still reduces the potential attack surface even in their own apps. So Gmail can’t be exploited to get your location and pictures. Chrome can’t be exploited to get your emails. YouTube can’t be exploited to get your location. Even internally, Google is a huge company with loads of employees involved. One could get rogue and add a backdoor, it would only get what that specific app has access to even though Google as a whole can probably get whatever they want.
Plus, I’d say even though I distrusr Google, I still trust them more than I would trust Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or basically most third party apps. My weather app just doesn’t need to know anything but my rough location. My bank app doesn’t need to know about my location at all, even though I trust my bank with my money. My health insurance app sure doesn’t need to know about anything whatsoever. No apps ever need my phone number or IMEI.
With the previous system, there was a lot of apps that bundled ad libraries that would then send out notifications pretending to be other apps, install other apps without the user’s consent, collect every bit of information possible operating out of Russia or China where you have zero legal recourse.
You may not trust Google, but they have clear, legally binding policies about what they collect, how they use it, and you can potentially sue them if you can prove they misused your data. You can’t say the same about TikTok for example.
The privacy controls benefit everyone. It benefits Google in Android not being seen as a free for all. It benefits users who can and do deny a lot of those permissions. It protects users from apps just getting everything and actively kicking those apps out the Play Store. You can even revoke most of those permissions from Google’s apps if you want. If you flash LineageOS without Gapps you still get all those privacy features without Google’s involvement at all.
Privacy is not a binary thing. Most people don’t want maximum privacy, they’ll happily give their location to Google so Maps work. That doesn’t mean they don’t care and want TikTok to have it all too because Google can.
Your reasoning only makes sense from the point of view that Google is the biggest threat to your privacy in the world amd that everyone else is good. There’s far, far worse than Google.