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A comment on Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads. Parent comment

Re:Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send teleme... by mappu on Saturday November 14, 2020 @02:46PM (#25095037)
There was a massive wave of phones being sold with unlocked bootloaders with preinstalled malware. How do you stop this? Unscrupulous retailers would buy thousands of your latest phone, root it and sell it for $1 less than MSRP, and make much more than that from injecting extra ads and stealing data. Not to mention, all the bad press "you" get for "shipping a phone with ads in it".

Mere tamper-evidence - having a "bootloader unlocked" warning on boot - isn't obvious enough for a new user who has just bought the phone for the first time. So all manufacturers have added time locks and anti-fraud detection for bootloader unlocking. The time lock in particular is the best way to cut down this effect during the early sales process after which time it's hard to catch up in review score. But a time lock can only be implemented securely via a remote server out of the user's hands.

Xiaomi getting the telemetry is a cherry on top, but it's not originally nefarious - or at least - it's less nefarious than the problem it's intending to solve

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Re:Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send teleme... by pbhjpbhj on Saturday November 14, 2020 @06:12PM (#25096566)
How about let adults wreck the phone they bought if they 'want' to. Bootloader unlock in a 'hidden' power-on menu is sufficient. If you really want to baby users just have this set a flag that requires a click box to be ticked on next boot in order to actually unlock it (eg "you selected to unlock your bootloader in the power-on menu; unlocking your bootloader may lead to you destroying your phone, do you want to continue?" "are you sure?" "pinky promise?").

The "we're protecting people from themselves" argument seems spurious.

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Re:Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send teleme... by goatsi on Saturday November 14, 2020 @06:48PM (#25096744)
>The "we're protecting people from themselves" argument seems spurious.

Because it isn't the argument at all? The goal is to protect your reputation from having malware and ad laced versions of your latest hardware flooding the market (and hitting the news). Users are just a secondary concern.

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Re:Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send teleme... by CountSessine on Saturday November 14, 2020 @10:34PM (#25098002)
His argument is that retailers are intercepting “the phone they bought” and preloading garbage on it and repackaging it before sending it to them. Maybe that’s something that happens a lot in China? If so, requiring registering on the Xiaomi website would be a pretty good way to thwart this.

In a way, it’s to protect naive users. And it still allows you to root the phone - go through this idiocy once and then never worry about it again.

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Re:Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send teleme... by DevopsTux on Sunday November 15, 2020 @01:02AM (#25098688)
The amount of data that is sent during the unlock process is absolutely ridiculous. Ever had an environment variable you don't want to share with Xiaomi, together with IP address, mail, phone number, geolocation, serial numbers, etc. ? Because all these gets sent. Unnecessary.
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