News Maps = Maps + Latitude + G+

Hardware Hub Phones, Tablets, & Wearables
1

I just saw on someone else's new device (I don't have gapps on my devices, and GMaps only works half decent in North-America anyway, and can't do offline navigation, and uses miserable sounding voices) that the new update of Google Maps needs permission now to view your contacts. So they have integrated latitude, that was killed some time ago, in Maps, so that they can trace everyone. Oh, but that's no problem, because you can set the phone in general settings not to reveal your position, right? Wrong, the person's phone was having less battery life, so she asked me to take a look at it, and the new Maps was overriding the general setting and locating the phone all the time. Don't believe me, uninstall the Maps updates, and see what happens (with the privacy setting set not to reveal your location)... you get an error that your location has been lost (and it was supposed to be off right, so even if it was off, the Maps update switched it on behind your back again)! So it does really override the privacy settings!

But that didn't solve the entire battery problem. The other nefarious google app seemed to be Google Music, which seemed to be actively scanning all over the phone all the time, even if the person did never even start the app, she had just updated it two days ago, she uses the standard Samsung music player.

After uninstalling the updates of Maps and Music, the battery life was normal again...

Hooray for closed source code and egregious obfuscation (yeah that's a paradox, it's intentional because it suits what's going on with Google).

 

So OK, it doesn't bring anything to rant without being part of the solution, and not everyone has a rooted phone and can actually configure it after rooting (like in no gapps at all and only open source apps, install busybox, configure iptables, and your security problems are gone, it's as simple as that), so here are my tips for protecting yourself in case you can't root your phone because you have a subsidized device or a carrier contract that makes it prohibited:

- Do not update GMaps and GMusic, obviously, the best is to block/disable them in settings, so that they just never start up. There are plenty of OSM-based navigation and map tools that also work offline. Do not install Google Navigation or Google Tracks or Google StreetView, it's as bad as the new GMaps, and you don't need it anyway, all the functionality thereof can be had for free, better, faster, and offline from open source based or open source apps that are safe to use and don't sell your soul to the devil behind your back;

- Do not share any pictures you make with G+ (the Google terms stipulate that they will use those pictures for face analysis and joining and linking content without any control on your part);

- Do NOT register your phone with your main account, register it with a new - unused - gmail account, that does nothing at all, install F-Droid from the web (download only with firefox or other open source browser), install K9Mail with the F-Droid app, configure K9Mail to handle all your real e-mail, it has exactly the same useful functionality as GMail but runs faster and runs secure, it doesn't use any Gapps services to run, but can still get all the info from the Google Mailserver if you want to use gmail, which means that Google will still read you e-mails on their server - unless you encrypt them with APG, which works seemlessly together with K9Mail - but at least Google won't be able to locate you or be able to link all your data in the several gapps together with your mail, because your gapps on your phone will report a different account that is not your mail account, and in the accounts section of your phone, your real mail account will not be there). So no loss of functionality, incredible gain in privacy and security, and battery life, because gapps use the bulk of the battery power in the apps department. You'll also notice that once you only have the Google TSRs running but don't use gapps that you can avoid anymore, you'll have about 150 MB of RAM more at your disposal, your phone will feel faster, and you'll have much less data traffic;

- Do not use the Google backup and restore function (if will only lead to Google selling your data, abusing your Wi-Fi connections to locate people and break into networks), use Samsung's or HTC's, because that way you can link it to your real mail account (that is not an account on your phone, just an account in K9Mail), which is not readable by Samsung or HTC, because they don't have your password and thus can't get to it. That also provides you with the means to wipe and block your phone in case of loss or theft, without sacrificing personal data for it;

- Uninstall the updates of Google Search, and block/disable it (there are two instances of google search that both have to be blocked on Google Now-capable devices). Uninstall the Android browser, and install Firefox for android, with ghostery, noscript, https everywhere, and incognito mode as default, and in firefox, uninstall all search engines except DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia. Then use Firefox instead of Google Search. If you want to have more functionality, install Wolfram Tools by side loading (do not get it from the PlayStore, it will only be linked to your account), which is much more powerful than Google Search, and also features voice search.

- Enjoy a faster, more secure android experience with longer battery life...

- Anyone have other tips to share?

2

Lattitude got destroyed! it's completely erased by Google. I used it in serveral situations, For keeping up where my friends are, And i even set up some accounts in our store for downright GPS tracking.

I don't think lattitude is integrated in the new package. As far as I can see it, it has dissapeared.

And im not quite happy about it..

3

So yeah, just to be clear, I know the trend in your topic was "be carefull with your data concerning gApps". I think the only hint then is not to use gapps at al, go completely AOSP, and use another store (aptoide!!). 

However I'm not one of these guys. Yes, I'm giving up my privacy. And lattitude was the best example of that. I don't care that everyone knows where I'm going. I mean, when I'm driving, you wouldnt be able to keep up with me anyway >:)

But seriously, privacy paranoia aside, Lattitude did stuff that was amazingly handy for me. And just like that they threw it away. It left a very bad taste in my mounth. I didn't even found a single reason for it...

4

- All the latitude functionality is still usable in the SDK, so it's integrated in Maps+Google+ instead of a separate app. Apps that use classes and calls that were specific to latitude in the GAPI still work, so that means the latitude functionality is integrated in Maps+Google+. Try it out for yourself, make a small app in eclipse, and run it on your phone, it will still work normally, even without latitude.

- AOSP comes with gapps, Cyanogenmod or PA or Project Kang or even MIUI would be better choices for people that can root and flash their phone, because they don't come with gapps.

5

yeah but I don't think the track-a-person functionality is there. Can you make that work from the maps-app? I certainly can't. Plz tell me how! :D

And Cyanogenmod for example comes without gapps, which you (optionally) can flash later. It was at least like that a year ago, when I still used cyanogenmod. I had to install gapps through the recovery every fresh install.

6

Oh I see now, It has shifted to Google+. I don't use google+, thats why I overlooked it, Sorry.

So they force you to use google+ for that aswell.... bastards... 

7

As for cyanogenmod; I remember "the nightly" builds did not had gapps integrated into the builds for testing purposes. Maybe thats the reason for our confusion?

8

- the person tracker is in the G+ interface now

- yes, that's what I said, AOSP has gapps, the others don't, I probably should have formulated it differently. Non-Google Android distros can't include Gapps because Gapps is not open source, it's proprietary.

9

Lol so you found out for yourself, gg

yeah, G+ = skynet lol

10

Nah, no worries, confusion way because I made a short sentence for once, I really need to cut down on short sentences, they are confusing lol

11

Yeah man what happened to the big explenatory posts :))

I was thinking for a moment OMG is this Zoltan? Someone must've Hijacked his account! NSA!

I called the intervention teams off, its fine now.

12

what music app do you recommend, I'd like to have a bit longer battery life

13

Most distros use some kind of version of the standard Apollo player, but DeadBeef for instance is quite nice, I use that on my non-Samsung devices and my self-assembled tablets, it all depends on the functionality you want. I personally like the standard Samsung player because it has a very good and power efficient DSP section, that can make the standard 2 USD Samsung in-ear phones sound like 100 USD headphones, and a nice interface. If it's open source, it doesn't run a lot of TSRs, and it automatically uses less power.

14

Greenify seems to take care of Maps and Facebook and other rare-used apps trying to run themselves for me. I uninstall every music player that doesn't do what I want, which so far has been every single one that came preinstalled in a rom, apollo, google play thingy, samsung player (the older ones at least)... because none of them (at that time) could add files based on directory... For DSP I use either the DSP manager or Equalizer that seems to be systemwide.

Never found google search to be particularly useful but it ran in the background all the time so that's one of the things I disable when configuring a new rom... anything that runs in the background when it shouldn't gets uninstalled or greenified... I hate ramtakers that have no use or are rarely used >.<

Recently I've been having issues with googles calendar, and possibly gmail as a result of that, not recognizing my accounts or something. When I go into calendar it asks me to add an account, so I add my account but it says it's already added (which it had been). A temp solution is to remove my account from the phone altogether and do it again, but that seems like a waste. There must be a better option for calendars linked to your google account? (I use it over 3 different devices, meh)

 

 

 

 

15

I'm just thinking about going back to old phones with buttons instead of smartphones. I've had my samsung galaxy S2 for about 2 years in October and all I've noticed is it being a pain in the a**. I haven't rooted it yet cause I have a contract for 2 years, but I honestly don't see the point of having it anymore. All I actually do with it is call and text people. I want to go back a couple of versions with the android OS cause it's slower now with the Jelly bean 4.1.2, but I can't cause it needs to get rooted to do it. I've had to reinstall the phone (or factory reset it and so on) to get it to work properly cause last time it just blocked all my text messages and ignored phone calls. There's no virus, It's just getting slow and more useless. Does anyone have any reason to why people like me should keep going with smartphones? I mean, I have used apps so much that I'm bored with all of it. If I need anything from the internet, I just use my PC. I know that there's been talks about old phones having bad protection for the simcard, but is it really that bad?

16

The google music app is constantly scanning because you have corrupt or illegal music and the drm scanner is going full retard. If you have none of that on your phone it wont happen (had to deal with this many times). Maps doesn't account for lots of my batter drain, and you can control location reporting but google nows location reporting is different and it pops up as maps on battery usage so maybe google now is the source of that problem?

17

Nah, DRM has nothing to do with it, you can even import 20.000 DRM-free titles into your google account and let Google DRM them for you, but that is actually illegal in many countries. The country my colleague's phone was in, doesn't have google music. Don't forget that apart from North-America, there aren't many countries where all Google Services on Android are enabled.

The same for Google Now, which has not one single card for the country the phone is located in, and therefore Google Now doesn't even start (if the widget is placed on the desktop it just displays a placeholder, the app is blocked from displaying anything because of the localisation).