jamesjamesdupre

> It basically means "not installed"

This seems to be the oddity in the discussion. Not installed has a lot of equivalents in some security models, but not many things have an equivalent to installed as an Android manufacturer package. If a package is re-enabled as a manufacturer one it bypasses play checks and Advanced Protection and maybe can hide itself as a system package.

Letting stalkerware through and avoid detections via the manufacturer store exception is IMO likely to be intentional on Google's part to be able to let Android succeed via manufacturer/telco customizations in countries where laws require malware. An unlocked Pixel was expected to be clean because it wouldn't be setup to be in one of these deals.

Most of the stuff you refer to are why a company would restrict phones (in its intranet) to only ones that were 1 vendor and not telco modified to possibly deliver the evil maid/police illegal wire tap post (short) arrest. We just discovered that there are not 2 such vendors, but one.

Sure, but their being foreign changing behavior a lot more? It's possible but its a better finding than Freud ever had.

It seems to me like a lot of it is hatred for the messengers.. But I think Palantir is a perfect organization to resentfully report a telco conspiracy to create a law enforcement back door as long as they didn't get a piece of it.

No it is not besides the point. They are not supposed to ship a setup where physical access escalates to permanent spying with no warnings because they are promising things about devices not about an ecosystem's overall functionality to build any possible configuration.

Many people feel Google and Apple have ulterior motives, but that is an academic argument unless they abandon this motive, at that point they need to always ship rooted insecure boot phones for our ease of use.

Linux is an ecosystem that includes Android. Pixel is an Andoid phone by Google that is supposed to be hardened against local attacks, showing when an unhardened OS is booted, etc.

No one cares that you can run a firewall on an insecure OS configuration, but they care if your shipped appliance does it.

This is all very true for a small startup and some kinds of skunk works projects.. Many companies Google's size don't allow you to work that way in general, and in some sense don't benefit from it because gaps caused by no need to write things down are too hard to fix later and more critical to them than not shipping at all.

If I had to guess, Google's problem is probably that they created ephemeral written text as the primary solution for communication. It is neither good for speed nor good for documentation as a consequence.