yeah that's the whack-a-mole / blacklist strategy. Its a loosing strategy.
It's much simpler to start with a clean Phone & add the stuff you need. Which is the white list strategy.
black-listing the spyware & malicious features, i'd rather start with a clean slate
Zoltan Opening post:
... Google, the company that is responsible for the single largest human rights violation campaign in the history of mankind in terms of number of victims and incidence of violations ...
Context matters: Zoltan clearly defined large, as amount of violations, not severity of violations (which you seem to be hinting at). You can't ridicule him for claim he didn't make, that's a logical fallacy usually called a straw-man-argument.
Resitor
... How many people does Google have locked in cages for smoking a joint? How many people has Google tortured in Guantanamo bay? How many people has Google killed in war? ...
You are listing human rights violations that are physical violence, but there are also non-physical-violent human rights violations. The fact that Google is not harming human bodies (as far as we know) is immaterial. Greater evil does not just justify lesser evil
"..." Context matters: Zoltan clearly defined large, as amount of violations, "..."
I agree, it does make a difference there. I would however like a list of all of these violations, and how they are sooooo much worse than what microsoft or th eNSA have done. (This is a legitimate question, not a shot at you, Im just putting it as part of this reply for ease)
I can't speak for Zoltan, so here's my assessment:
I'm not sue if the NSA-privacy violations are worse, since we still don't know the hole story. But Google definitely has racked up an gargantuan amount of privacy violations.
Microsoft is avoidable, Google is omnipresent.
Turning off google's information gathering is not in reach for most citizens, not using google services is virtually impossible, since most websites have ajax.googleapis.com fonts.googleapis.com & google-analytics.com. Most Android Phones come with google on-board. Heck even Cyanogen-mod runs google analytics.
The information gathering needs to be opt-in for it to conform to EU-law. The opt out system is basically saying that you need to opt out of human-rights-violation. The sanctity of your human rights cannot be dependant upon your own intervention or technical know-how.
The do-not-track-me browser-flag needs to be respected, and it needs to be the default option. For it to not count as human rights violation. The Smart-phone default configurations need to follow the same principle.
Lets not forget that even if you make a google-account and opt-out, they aren't actually stopping the user-data-collection they simply no longer send you targeted ads.
If you actively pursue to guard your privacy (browser add-ons, vpn etc), they aggressively try to break your privacy by running browser finger-printing including the new html5-canvas-element-hashing. This predatory behaviour collides with deeply engrained core values in Europe.
I'm not displaying some minority curmudgeon opinion: _all_ the non tech-savvy people in my social sphere have asked to reconfigure their gadgets to the end of "blinding the creepy companies"
I realize that American sensibilities probably differ greatly in this regard.
Nobody said what Google is doing is worse or better than what NSA and Microsoft is doing. At least, that's what I got.
To be honest, this whole argument seems flawed to me. The fact that there are other people/entities/whatever that do worse things than Google doesn't mean that what Google is doing is good or any less wrong. It is still WRONG (all caps).
I know that Logan, Wendell and Qain believe that Google is ok (I think they actually said "good") because it is the lesser of all evils (most obvious: The Tek in Taipei), but that's frankly stupid. Maybe this is part of the corporate propaganda that the Americans are subjected to every day, maybe it's the mind lying to itself as a self-defense mechanism, either way, it's absurd.
Thank you for the well thought out, and helpful reply.
Here, Here
is there an android phone, or any phone, that you can buy which is "clean" from day 1?
actually, the reason google dropped the SD card support is for the app storage. on an sd card, they have to add a partition to it thus limiting the app storage to like a gb or 2. I ran into this with one of my old android phones with the sd card. Google really dont care what rom or kernel your running on your phone. As long as it meets within standards its fine
If you mean as in AOSP type stuff, yeah the Motorola phones come with as close to stock Android with some of their useless apps on it. Clean as in no one spying on you? probably not.
Buy an oppo phone. They dont give a rats ass if you root your phone. Infact they give their users the tools to do so.
Thanks. The latter is what i meant. I guess we're stuck with the process of de-googling our phones for the time being.
Can't you just unlock your bootloader then root it then install Cyanogenod
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