[freeflight]

Anybody using an android device will help Google aggregate data about you because as soon as your details are added to the contacts app those will be cross-referenced with other data Google has about you.

That’s exactly how Google ended up in possession on my mobile phone number in relation to my mail address: A friend added the same e-email address I use for YouTube to my android contact, which also included my phone number.

His android contacts app then proceeded to use my YouTube profile picture for my contact with my phone number.

[lern_too_spel]

Unlike iOS, Android lets you choose which contacts app to use and does not require you to log into any accounts at all to use the phone. You seem to be transferring what you know about iOS to Android when that does not transfer at all.

[freeflight]

> Android lets you choose which contacts app to use

How many people actually go trough the trouble of getting a third party contacts app?

> does not require you to log into any accounts at all to use the phone

That still doesn't stop Google from processing the data that people enter. Just like the fact that even without logging into an Google account there's a ton of unique identifies to track just baked into phone hardware alone.

> You seem to be transferring what you know about iOS to Android when that does not transfer at all.

I'm not "transferring" anything, nor did anything similar happen in the 10+ years I've been using iOS phones.

None of my iPhones contact apps ever pulled account details from other Apple services to populate the phone contact with. Yet on my friends Android phone all he had to do was enter my phone number and the same e-mail address I used to register a YouTube account, and Google matched and linked those two together to populate the contact with my YouTube profile picture.

Which means that somewhere in the massive Google database these two identifiers will now be linked, even tho I specifically went out of my way not to give Google my mobile number.

[lern_too_spel]

> How many people actually go trough the trouble of getting a third party contacts app?

100% of the users who don't want to give their contacts to Google. You're right that the Google contacts app provides a far superior experience to the iOS contacts app, so most users who don't care about providing their data will use that if it's the default.

> That still doesn't stop Google from processing the data that people enter.

But how will Google get the contact information? The fact remains that iOS requires the user to log into an Apple account. iOS requires users to tell Apple all the apps they run and ties that information to their Apple account. iOS requires that anybody who wants to get their location also send their location to Apple. Android does none of these.

> Yet on my friends Android phone all he had to do was enter my phone number and the same e-mail address I used to register a YouTube account, and Google matched and linked those two together to populate the contact with my YouTube profile picture.

This is called contact merging, which Google's contacts app does far better than iOS's. iOS is a far less usable platform with far more unavoidable privacy invasions.