This isn’t related to the context of the post, but I recall giving a review in an earlier post regarding the blog site. Assuming you (positive-intentions) are the same person as the author of the previous post (xoron), It’s impressive how you came this far with your blog and apps since then.
Your blog post about bottom-up browser state management was particularly interesting because I was dealing with indexedDB before and ended up going with a wrapper while I personally wanted to work with a custom solution. The explanations for the code snippets are to-the-point, easy to follow and overall well written which I really appreciate as a person not experienced in reading blogs.
Also I enjoyed your in-house illustrations. Keep up the great work!
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?
Is this some sort of a convenience feature hidden behind a paywall to justify purchasing their subscriptions or does generating the codes actually cost money? If the latter is the case, how do applications like Aegis do it free of cost?
Adding to the original question, is it ethically OK to keep using these corporate AI tools? I fear engaging with it would give these companies all the more reason to develop them further and continue their illegal data extraction. I would personally prefer to boycott them but I am unsure as to whether it would be akin to shooting myself in the foot by this point.