Finally a good, nuanced article on this topic, thanks for sharing. Only drawback is that the author doesn’t seem to be aware that degoogling your phone is a viable alternative, especially with manufactures like Fairphone offering this out of the box.
Lots of people (including myself, previously) fall for the narrative that Apple can financially justify not spying on their users because their hardware is expensive. Versus Google, who have always been about ads and data mining.
This logic unfortunately fails to consider that a publicly trading company will always use all methods at their disposal to keep up profit so shareholders are happy. Expensive hardware was probably enough a decade ago, but the golden rule is: as long as a company can fuck you over in a way that increases profits, they absolutely will, given enough time.
We need federal privacy law in the U.S. and we need it fast.
From now on whenever I talk about Android with Google Play Services I’ll refer to it as the “shit sandwich OS”