[TheSpiceIsLife]

> is spying on the major tech companies and would regularly demand data and place gag orders on those companies.

So you agree.

> Neither actions are willful forms of data transfer.

What’s that got to do with it?

> Equating these with the US government having full access to everyone's data is misleading.

If the data exists, the only prudent approach is to assume state-level actors, at least, can get access to it.

[tastroder]

The discussion is beyond "if the data exists", it will be gathered and some people seem to prefer yelling at clouds instead of looking at the technical implementation.

Even nation state actors will have a harder time gathering data that only exists locally on a bunch of smartphones, separate from geolocation as proposed here, versus a centralised database lacking comprehensive oversight.

The rest is pretty irrelevant, we're talking about data collection using phones that already have an OS from both of these vendors. "But Snowden" is really no argument anybody in these discussions will listen to (and I'm not convinced they should if it's used in a way to imply that you shouldn't use the internet for anything). If you have a problem with data collection for contact tracing please be specific why and optimally provide what you feel would be a better alternative.