[orisho]

In newer versions of Android, apps which are not opened by the user have their permissions automatically and periodically revoked. So they no longer have the permissions, and when reopened, the user needs to grant the permissions again interactively. Presumably to solve this.

[hnburnsy]

Thats great but their is a boat load of permissions that Android allow that never require user acceptance and are never revoked. Total disablement when not used would be much better.

[always2slow]

Doesn't really matter when google itself makes its data and infrastructure available for "target acquisition" AI. See Project Maven and Nimbus.

[rrix2]

Damn I guess we shouldn't do any small step to improve society somewhat unless we can overhaul systems entirely all at once!

Personally, I'd prefer to see us fight for successively smaller and smaller blast radii than simply hoping and praying the blasts disappeared entirely.

[always2slow]

Small steps get us things like pop ups on every webpage or TSA. You'll just slowly create a bureaucratic dystopia. We need giant sweeping reform of privacy laws in the US and a restoration of the 4th amendment.

[rrix2]

Godspeed, you!

[shadowgovt]

Of course it matters. A bad thing being bad doesn't imply a good thing isn't good.

[always2slow]

Not in the context of the government buying the data, they'll just buy it from google instead of shadowgovt.databroker.com. It's a red herring, a feel good feature that just limit's googles competition and doesn't really change the information collected on us.

[shadowgovt]

Google doesn't sell it, is the thing.

Unless you're somehow claiming that your browsing history was used to train an AI for identifying tanks or terror connections, in which case for the former that makes no sense and for the latter the data is so emulsified that it can't really be considered your data any more than you could lay claim to a cat recognizer that was trained on a billion cat photos, some of which happen to be from your blog.

(And that's even assuming one accepts the premise that Google's cache of browsing data was used to train the AI that the Israeli government is using. In reality, that information is deeply firewalled and doesn't see the light of day for other applications).

[always2slow]

You're arguing in bad faith, making this about browser history, this is about data collection of the sensor array that is your smart phone device, two very different things. It's hilarious to claim that what google is doing by disabling app access matters at all when google created the problem and profits from it in a really shady way all the while pretending to be doing you a service by protecting you from those 'shady' apps (and 3rd party app stores like say.. f-droid). And then using that data to _literally_ kill people. I'm not saying those apps aren't shady, I'm saying google pretending to protect you is shady.

[shadowgovt]

Sorry; I just don't follow. Google isn't "protecting" me from F-droid; I have it on my Android right now. Nor is Google using cellphone telemetry to kill people. Nor is Google (AFAIK; if there's evidence to the contrary I'd be interested to see it) providing cellphone data to nations that are targeting them for death (Google doesn't even own a cell tower deployment). Nor is geotargeting people based on cellphone data a system limited to Google's architecture; that's a feature of cellphones, because they're little radios we carry in our pockets that continuously broadcast to a mesh network in an attempt to allow connection to it.

I don't think I'm arguing in bad faith, but I am trying to argue with someone who seems to be operating from a source of facts I don't have access to. You seem to be upset that Google makes cellphones? What am I missing here?

[hulitu]

> Google doesn't sell it, is the thing.

Then they give it for free.

[shadowgovt]

They don't do that either.

Google's value in tracking is in providing services to users with the tracked data and (in the ads arm) linking advertisements to potential interested users (which is a system they broker internally).

They don't hand data to third-parties; third-parties hand data to Google, and Google might kick out answers to questions, but it does not kick out answers to questions like "Hey, is this person a terrorist?" There's no program for that. Hell, Google doesn't even kick out answers to questions like "Would Bob like to buy my shoes," the entire ad network is architected to minimize the ways an advertiser could glean the identity of a specific user who saw their ad.