[fortythirteen]

I hope you're not using a potential bug as evidence of malfeasance.

There's really no argument here. Google is the world's #1 internet activity-tracking organization.

Apple is a hardware company that has data retention policies roughly somewhere around what one would expect for the pervasiveness of it's technology. I don't have to like either, but I'd be a fool to think that we're talking about equal amounts of intrusion.

Just what Google could do with the same amount of phone tracking, tied to all the other information it gathers from the multitude of other gathering apparatuses it operates makes an Andriod the less privacy minded option.

[ekianjo]

> I hope you're not using a potential bug as evidence of malfeasance.

Is it a bug though, or a feature? On Windows 10 regular updates do the exact same thing and revert your privacy settings back to default, as far as I know.

> Just what Google could do with the same amount of phone tracking, tied to all the other information it gathers from the multitude of other gathering apparatuses it operates makes an Andriod the less privacy minded option.

You can use Android outside of the Google ecosystem. I have Firefox as my main browser on Android, and I dont use Google Play stores, while iOS gives you no option to use alternatives.

[ocdtrekkie]

In Windows 10, it is also a potential bug, rather than evidence of malfeasance. As someone who works with Windows a lot, proving malicious intent on their part requires solid evidence: We already have tons of solid evidence of incompetence and poorly tested software. ;)

[ekianjo]

Is it that hard to keep existing settings, or is it just that there is an obvious incentive for them to revert said settings to spy on you as you use Windows?

If they had nothing to gain, you could claim it's a misunderstanding or a bug, but when there are obvious benefits into letting such things happen, I'd say you should be suspicious as to why it's even occurring.

[ocdtrekkie]

This is true, but I think we also see a lot of Windows issues that have no obvious gain for Microsoft, to the extent that it definitely seems like incompetence is a common source for issues over malfeasance. It is possible Microsoft is vastly smarter than I give them credit and has carefully buried their malfeasance in their incompetence, but I don't think we have any evidence of nearly that much cleverness on Microsoft's part any time recently. ;)

[doomrobo]

>Is it a bug though, or a feature?

It's a bug.