The list of bad actors is long and inglorious, but Google is the worst of all. See how many knots you can get in your stomach by reading this list:
31 sats \ 1 reply \ @davidw 12 Dec 2023
- Great screenshot. Definitely deserves attention. Might need to start a 30 day SN challenge to ween people off from gmail or Apple OS.
- Apple is pretty much as bad, most likely holding a gun to Google's head to report everything there. Especially as they don’t play around on Android.
- Apple can conceal their own labels, since they own the store and rarely does anyone need to download additional Apple apps. Not to mention their data is all recorded at the OS level.
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396 sats \ 0 replies \ @rybka 13 Dec 2023
All valid points, but I am certainly a lot less skeptical towards Apple given their income is from hardware and cloud services, not data processing. Yeah – they are legally obliged to pre-scan all content before encryption and compare it to known databases of illegal images etc., but their business model is about selling expensive physical products.
On the other hand, Google's entire business model is around harvesting and selling data to third parties, and services such as Chrome, Chromebooks, Pixels etc. are to extend the capacity to gather data to sell more of it and train their AI with it so they can sell that too.
If a normal person who values convenience wants to improve their privacy, I would personally recommend Apple over Android or Microsoft any day. iOS is also notoriously difficult to breach, especially because updates are often forced, meaning most users are on a similar, recent version of the software. You can't say the same about Android or Microsoft, which leaves these devices vulnerable to known exploits.
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