Now I’m thinking with portals.

Neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Chinese had video recording or even photography, which seems to be the metaphor that allows people to explain what they do or don’t have.

I must have relatively weak mental imagery? I can imagine seeing an apple, or recall the visual memory of my fruit bowl, but I’m hard-pressed to extract any definitive visual information from it, like I could if I really was looking at it. I’m visualizing the fruit bowl, but how many apples am I visualizing exactly? If I decide I’m visualizing two, now I’ve lost the relationship between the banana and the orange. I can see the Mona Lisa, but where do her arms go, actually? Maybe sort of crossed somewhere? What’s going on behind her, some kind of green-brown pointy trees? Nope, there’s her cheek again and some paint cracks. It’s less like looking at a picture and more like dreaming of one.

I don’t think it is right to trivialize rape like that.

Hacker Robin Hood obvs. rocking programmer socks

I don’t think the burden should be on users, but I do think some of the burden should be on the press. If the press just assumes Google is up to no good and never does the investigative reporting needed to show it, we will miss out on having very politically useful evidence.

Anytime I want cooperation I will need to persuade you.

That sounds suspiciously like democracy, the thing we would quite like to achieve.

But they aren’t even showing collection of data in the article. For the data to be collected, it needs to leave the phone, not just be touched by Play Services.

Play Services does collect data it shouldn’t collect, by sending it back to Google. But the difference between “I am collecting your data” and “I wrote software you are running” is important and needs defending, because obscuring it is one way that independent developers are prevented from publishing and marketing actually-privacy-preserving software. If I am deemed to have “collected” your personal data every time you type it into a text editor I wrote, I can no longer distinguish my local-only encrypted text editor from Google’s one that stores all your data unencrypted on their cloud. We both have to say we “collect” your data, and nobody non-technical can tell the difference.

You can buy a phone that arrives running GrapheneOS. This might not be advisable, because it adds another point of trust in the refurbisher who actually does the flashing, but you don’t need to have the skills or do the research to install it yourself to get access to a device that runs it.

It’s not that I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, it’s that the article neglects to bring in that whole thread of the argument that you give here. This should all be in the article.

The SensorVault data is “just” the Google Maps Timeline data though, right? Which people have always been able to turn on and off, if they knew about it.

I feel like Google not really respecting a concept of user consent and pretending people agree to poorly-publicized and often-modified tracking programs is a different, and, frankly, weirder, privacy problem than there being closed source stuff running with high permissions. If you could revoke permissions from Play Services, or if it was source available or even free software, that wouldn’t solve the problem because it would still be able to do stuff Google had manufactured consent for it to do.

Do you mean “transmits” as in “from the location service on the phone to the mapping app on the phone”?

Or do you mean the phones are all updating the wifi SSID geolocation database, which they then all can use for doing wifi-based geolocation?

The article seems to go directly from “this piece of software talks to all the sensors and isn’t well sandboxed” to “Google has directed this software to profile and surveil users” without actually providing evidence to support that leap. Is Google Play Services sampling your location so that it can send it in to Google HQ as part of a secret location tracking operation that runs without user consent or knowledge, or so that it can detect if the device has been stolen by the cops and use its proprietary ML model to activate anti-theft mode to protect the user’s privacy?

If we can actually show mismanagement of user data by Google Play Services, we need to shout it to the hills, because those sorts of scandals are important arguments for increased privacy protections. But we need to actually find that mismanagement occurring, not just assume it must be because Google wrote the code and it isn’t open source.

But if a Graphene device takes a non-malicious approach to data management out of the box, can’t you just buy one of those instead of doing research and taking charge of your device to proactively prevent spying? Why not just let a trustworthy organization like the Graphene project manage it for you, instead of an untrustworthy one like Apple?

I confuse “attractive” and “naked” on a regular basis. I frequently have to remind myself to consider if I am seeing an attractive person, or just a person who currently is not wearing many clothes.

I had no idea these existed and they look amazing!

Where do you buy these that isn’t under boycott?

I didn’t say we should only or instead make a replacement structure, I said we should also make a replacement structure, not because it’s easier, but because I think the boycott would depend on having one in order to work.

That’s why we need to show up with a bunch of Ticketmaster boycotters. Every successful social movement needs a carrot and a stick.

Or at a time of the choosing of the one rich dude who has root on all the cars.

Sounds like a lot of people are out there selling defective hardware.

How do they propose to prevent it? They can’t stop me from starting a band, they can’t stop you from having me play at your house. Exclusivity agreements don’t work on the fundamentally disagreeable.