Hyperbole much?
>Some of that is disguised as perfectly innocent and helpful features: contacts syncing, back-ups, connecting more easily to WiFis, etc.
Disguised? Um... That's how those features work.
Your personal information is a currency that you have to budget. Want timely weather information in your location? Guess what? You have to spend a little location currency to get that.
Edit to add:
> The conclusion is that the poor will get abused either way, be it through price gouging or in more difficult to recognise ways.
Why are you picking on the poor here? What are you trying to generalize about?
I don't have anything against these features per se, but I can't help but notice when it's almost imposssible to turn them off and dark patterns are used to guide customers onto certain paths where more data is shared. Then one starts to wonder for whose benefits are the features developed.
You are commiting an error when thinking that it's solely the responsibility of customers to take care of their privacy. There needs to be a strong legal framework and incentives should be set in such a way as to encourage respectful handling of customer data.
Because otherwise we end up in a situation where powerful corporations do as they wish as long as they stay within the too weak legal requirements (which they lobbied for) and it's the responsibility of the customer to:
* protect their privacy when everyone is trying to screw them and grab their data. Now they're a tech expert.
* protect their health because corps want to produce cheap goods and some ingredients cause e.g. birth defects or impotence. Now they're a chemistry expert.
* be careful what food they buy, because food nowadays is mass produced with bleach, antibiotics and hormones, pesticides & other nice stuff. Now they're an agricultural expert.
* and so on and so forth.
I hope it's clear that this doesn't work and the average citizen needs someone to have their back. In the USA they don't, so every corporation is trying its best to gather and mine private data.
And I am not picking on the poor at all, check your reading comprehension please. In fact I seem to be one of the few that is concerned about how the non-technical, and yes the poor too get screwed over by people recommending them that they use cheap products. If you want to recommend Android, take the time to educate people on what they are trading away for that affordable phone and tell them how to maintain their privacy.
I in no way said privacy was solely in the hands of the customer. I said your personal data is a currency that the customer must budget. That is not the same thing.
I don't think they want to for that reason; the reason they can gain access to such data is that if it's entirely in the user's hands (and passwords) then there's no way to recover the data for the user if they forget the password.
As for the grandparent comment: I trust Apple with my data more than Google because Apple doesn't want to use it, has no financial incentive to do so, and has no track record of subverting my privacy unlike Google (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/08/googl...).
The problem with those cheap phones is that your private information
will be mercilessly sucked into the Google cloud. Some of that is
disguised as perfectly innocent and helpful features: contacts
syncing, back-ups, connecting more easily to WiFis, etc.
of course it's extra work, but it's not rocket science. so if you really care about privacy, it's trivial to do. but as pointed out: most people don't, no matter if they have a cheap phone or not.
the parent claimed that you pay for these cheap phones with your private data, which is not true. if you care about that (which > 99.8% of the population don't do) you are able to use those phones with those features without handing over your data to google.
The problem is: Access to the App Store. Not sure, if you can work around this.
The end result though is that your entire digital life will be on some Google server. Preventing this requires significant effort and technical expertise.
We got windows phones at work: the activation process is a comical list of "turn off this", "deactivate that", "say no to so and so" data sync policy. But, I guess you can in the end disable the thing.
iOS is probably the least bad in this respect. I won't say it's good or anything, but at least they show some respect towards customers.
The conclusion is that the poor will get abused either way, be it through price gouging or in more difficult to recognise ways.