[kkfx]

A curious question: why caring about app privacy when the ecosystem they live in is designed to milk data? We do want only big&powerful being able to eavesdrop privacy but not countless of smaller actors?

It might sound sterile polemics but it's not, I'm really curious how techies can talk about privacy on Android, iOS etc. My sole opinion there is just avoid using them.

[wintermutestwin]

>privacy on Android, iOS etc

I was looking for your comment, but this line equating the two highlights a constant ambiguity in HN comments re: the threat model. Cut and paste from another of my comments on the subject:

If the subject threat model here is (1) defending against companies stealing and selling my data then Google should be called out. If the (2) state level agencies spying on you through these companies then you can add Apple to the call out.

I see this happen often and I think every conversation should be clearly grounded in the threat model that is being addressed.

[woojoo666]

There are also people working on privacy friendly mobile OSs, like GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, or DivestOS. Simply not using Android or iOS, is a big ask for a lot of people. Reducing tracking by using a privacy friendly OS and downloading privacy respecting apps, is a way to reduce tracking while still maintaining most of the convenience of a mobile device.

[Bilal_io]

> We do want only big&powerful being able to eavesdrop privacy but not countless of smaller actors?

We don't. And that's why there are efforts to create operating systems that are do not track users. Unfortunately those efforts are not well funded.

Again, we don't want big companies to track us and collect our data, but your questions sounds more like "since big companies collect our data, why should we put an effort to prevent everyone else from doing it?" I apologize if I am misreading what you're saying, but we have to do this one thing since the alternative is available, and once an alternative OS is here, we can switch to it as well.

[kkfx]

No need to apologize :-) but you miss a real-world part: we do have some open-platform, even if NOT open hardware desktops, we do not have anything easy to buy at a reasonable price for mobile.

I own a Pine64 phone, it's nice to play as it was the old OpenMoko, but it's not much usable as a daily driver suggestible to generic users, including those who can use GNU/Linux desktop normally as simple users. That's the biggest issue and it's a similar systemic issue described above: we can't have really Free software if it need non-free systems to run, so we can't have free OSes if they demand non-free hw + fw crap.

Since desktops so far are at least manageable I generally suggest to run to save them, pushing desktop computing again and simply say mobile world so far is just a prison. This way perhaps since actually we need desktops to work in 99% of the cases we would been able to have them in the future, as "free" as today...

[0daystock]

This is it. There's no point to privacy "apps" on a platform with Google Play Services. You're just polishing brass on the Titanic.