Stories like this, the Uber story, and the recent one about Google tracking location even when you opt out, are why I'm looking forward to Purism 5 with PureOS and kill switches.
How does having some kill switch solve the issue of an app that needs geolocation selling the data or otherwise using it in a way other than you intended?
Having an OS and apps I can trust to not send location data solves that problem. The kill switches ensures no roving bugs, modem AT commands, and passive tower triangulation when I'm not using the radio. Pretty simple really.
That argument is so tired. Just because there's no perfect privacy, doesn't mean you can't significantly increase it. At some point you also have to trust that the chair you're sitting on will hold you and the one that isn't visibly weak has the best chance of doing that.
Only using “app you can trust” seriously limits what you can do on your device. This might be a solution for you, but it’s really not a solution to the privacy problem, it’s duct-tape on something that needs to be fixed on a larger scale.
>A solution for a few outliers doesn’t really influence the big picture.
There's nothing stopping anyone from buying a Purism 5. If someone doesn't care about their privacy, they don't deserve it. Freedom isn't free, and all that.
> it’s going to need to know where I am to provide me the forecast
Why would you think that? I don't need to give a weather app my location. It only needs to have one or more locations of interest to me. My weather widget pulls multiple locations for me, and has no access to my location data.
Not sure what kind of strawman you're building here but there's quite a big difference between giving location to a map app that will help you if you're lost, and a weather app. Having to use location data to get weather seems like the pinnacle of laziness to me, if you don't know where you are than you have bigger problems than the weather.
>There's nothing stopping anyone from buying a Purism 5
Apart from the fact that it doesn't actually exist yet.
Not to mention it's already a badly specced phone commanding top dollar being made by a small company that could easily go broke in a year.
I'm all for what they are trying to achieve and really hope they succeed, but history is full of privacy phones that have failed spectacularly.
For half the price I could get a flagship Xiaomi, flash LineageOS on it and have a completely degoogled high quality Android phone likely supported for most of the next decade.
>Apart from the fact that it doesn't actually exist yet.
Well, sure, I'll give you that point, but it's going to happen.
>it's already a badly specced phone commanding top dollar
The selling point isn't the specs. It's the RYF certification and kill switches. Even if they can't get the RYF, it's still a better option than anything else out there.
>being made by a small company that could easily go broke in a year
I really doubt that. They have a laptop business already. They've been doing hardware for a while. This one might ship months late, but I'm confident it will happen.
>For half the price I could get a flagship Xiaomi, flash LineageOS on it and have a completely degoogled high quality Android phone likely supported for most of the next decade.
Yep, and you still have a sealed battery, a backdoored baseband, and binary blobs. The iMX.8 is pretty sweet. It has open source GPU. Can't say that for mali or powervr. I can consider making Librem 5 my convergence device.