Reply to post: Re: F-Droid only if you can

Re: F-Droid only if you can

@King Jack,

@ bazza Please can we stop using that stupid argument

Ooo, touchy! Been stung by some Android malware recently?

As you blatantly ignored my innocent call for debate on my question, I'll kick it off.

So what's worse? An app whose permissions are blatantly and clearly more acquisitive than necessary?

Or Google's lengthy EULA which grants them far more rights, yet goes unread by and largely unexplained to end users?

Google are fundamentally no more or less trustworthy than any other US company. Arguably they're less trustworthy than a European company who operate in a much stronger data protection legal environment. Google operate in a data protection legal vacuum by comparison.

But they're just another company, and one who are on a mission to get more of your private data so as to screw more advertising revenue from that market. So far they have managed to be far more successful at it than most others so far.

Granting them special access to ones private data is fine if that's what one wants. But having done that it's inconsistent to then whinge about an app that quite openly and clearly (by means of its permissions) tries to do the same thing but on a more limited basis. Especially as it can be avoided entirely, simply by not installing it.

Sure, an app such as this keyboard seems particularly slimy (but then so is Google's EULA), and it is kinda crazy to install it. But millions of installers seem not too worried about the permissions that were put before their very eyes.

Difficult Challenge For Google

It might be that this kind of thing gets installed because people don't care, which in turn may be because they don't put anything they really care about on their phones.

Yet Google wants them to trust their entire lives to their mobile (so they can extract advertising cues from it). However if people are deliberately withholding data from them that's going to limit how much Google can grow their business.

And then there'll always be those people who find the whole Google-sees-everything nature of Android utterly repulsive. And given Apple's success, you have to conclude that there's a monied majority (majority as in Apple have made more money than Google) who'd rather not join Google's club. And then you get the BB10 users such as myself...