Our world is starting to looka lot like that of the Space Merchants..
The only acceptable answer is a legal/regulatory solution.
I hear this argument brought up a lot, that the only thing that can fix this is regulations. I've always come at this from the opposite direction -- regulatory solutions are nice, and I'm not against them, but they're less useful than technological solutions because my gut instinct is regulations only cover a) law-abiding entities (and usually only corporations at that), who are b) competent enough not to mess up compliance in the first place.
The perspective I lean on by default is that even if you have good regulations in place, the problem isn't really solved until there's a widespread technical solution. So for example, it might be nice to have a law banning MITM attacks, but HTTPS is the superior solution that we really want. When we pass laws criminalizing stuff like hacking or tracking children, my perspective is we're just trying to buy time and localize the damage to the slightly less frequented parts of the Android app store while we fix the crappy permissions models and sandboxing on our core platforms.
Is there a secondary aspect to the regulatory solutions that I'm missing? Something that would go much, much farther and be much stricter than laws like GDPR? I don't mean it as an argument, I'd just be curious to hear someone with the regulation>infrastructure perspective elaborate more on what they're thinking about when they say that, because it's a perspective I don't have much experience with.
First, our computing devices do not protect our privacy and security sufficiently. It's a general problem, not limited or even particularly affecting Android. And you deal with general problems differently than with incidental ones. You don't tell people in an epidemic to "just go see a doctor."
Second, I do more sensitive computing in the browser on my computer than I do on my phone. It's the bigger issue.
Finally, the way we dealt with Internet worms and viruses was not by strongly stating how unacceptable infecting other people's computers is. We patched our software, kept it up to date, and even completely changed its design. Later shamed Microsoft into doing the same.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
https://www.businessinsider.com/ifa-apples-iphone-tracking-i...
And the developer will pinky promise that they won’t abuse it....
I'm sure there's a Google rep somewhere that will tell you that their "advertising ID" is better than the status quo on the web because the user can rotate it and, because it's reliable and easy for app devs to use, they are discouraged from being more nefarious and sneaky in tracking users.
This is all a bloody distraction from the point: it should not be an acceptable norm for this tracking to happen and it should be as hard as possible to pull off without informed user consent.
The degree to which platforms are defensive against it is a different issue to whether or not they actively encourage it by design... which shouldn't even be open to debate.