Quote:
Originally Posted by
addabox 
And your "open" Android phone is simply the vehicle for a relentless ad company to collect as much data as humanly possible on every aspect of their users lives to sell to advertisers the better to, as Schmidt proudly puts it "read your minds."
Go peddle your creepy, ad driven, privacy free utopia somewhere else. You can proudly declare your "freedom" while being bought and sold every every second of the day.
Their privacy policies could certainly be a cause for concern:
http://www.google.com/mobile/privacy.html
The majority is no different from Apple but some things sound like they go too far:
"Most of the other information we collect for mobile, such as your device and hardware IDs and device type, the request type, your carrier, your carrier user ID, the content of your request, and basic usage stats about your device"
As you say, Google makes their money from advertising and advertisers love usage information. It's not necessarily a breach of personal privacy and Apple's marketing groups need this information too but it would give them an advantage over the competition. Carriers can also add their own tracking code to an open OS.
Jobs gave an insight into their own stance on privacy:
"Well we learned this really interesting thing. Some company called Flurry had data on devices that we were using on our campus new devices. They were getting this info by getting developers to put software in their apps that sent info back to this company! So we went through the roof. Its violating our privacy policies, and its pissing us off! So we said were only going to allow analytics that dont give our device info only for the purpose of advertising."
So they are ok with analytics data for the purpose of advertising, which is what Google do. Obviously because Apple prefer to keep device IDs secret and Google have a huge host of devices, Google would rather have the device IDs. In that respect your personal identifiers are more protected with Apple but Apple have the credit card details, address, name, phone number and more of 160 million users and this is tied to media/app purchases and usage, which is how they rank the iTunes Store. Google will do the same for the Android market.
I don't think you can condemn either company when they behave much the same but with respect to their differing core businesses.
Which of the following would you prefer to see happen?
1. Windows 7 Mobile gets proliferated across a vast array of consumer devices with Windows media support, Zune store access, XBox 360/WinMo exclusive games
2. Nokia handles the bulk of consumer phones with an irrelevant OS
3. Google puts an open unix system out and pushes people into both iOS and Android development as well as supporting widely accepted web standards and implementations such as webkit
4. RIM start going after the consumer market by lowering prices
I think given that Apple will not lower prices into a certain consumer price bracket, not condemning Google is the best way forward. Obviously supporting them at Apple's expense is no good if you think Apple deserve to succeed but I don't see any reason in trying to vilify them in an attempt to see someone far worse step in and take their place.
When someone asks you for a phone recommendation and they can't afford an iPhone, what will you answer be? Mine is to buy an Android phone. If they can afford an iPhone, I recommend an iPhone over Android phones in that price bracket. Until the day comes when Apple sell iPod Touches with external phone parts, that's the closest you can get to supporting Apple IMO.
. Everyone's entitled to their opinion of course, I just feel that people are trying too hard to keep Google's efforts down because they took a lot of their ideas from Apple without crediting them for it and now hope to gain from it at Apple's expense.
