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Battery saver had been turned on for a lot of Pixel users unintentionally, according to Google employee
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- Title
- PixelCommunity's comment from discussion "is anyone else's power saving mode turning itself on even though you have it off?"
- Authors
- PixelCommunity
- Word count
- 76 words
This links to the Google's response on reddit regarding the situation.
I think that this incident must be a wake-up call for anyone who uses Android - it shows just how much control Google has over your device. It's safe to assume that they have full remote control of your phone, including all its settings, applications and whatnot. When privacy advocates such as myself are on a soapbox telling people that this is exactly how it is people roll their eyes or ignore that, but when something like that actually happens it brings the topic to the front pages of most popular websites.
I wanted to ask you - do you think there is a better way of explaining to general public that privacy matters? It seems like everything comes down to trust - everyone is OK with Google having such power on paper, but when Google uses this power even as a "small" mistake - that's a headline-worthy offense.
I mean, it should be a wake-up call to anyone who uses an OEM OS. I highly doubt Apple doesn't have this same capability with iOS. I imagine the only way to avoid this is to use an open-source ROM like Cyanogen or whichever.
The problem is that not everyone knows how to jailbreak their phone, or wants to risk it in the name of privacy. Even if you convince more people of the importance, there's going to be a lot of people who say "Well what exactly am I supposed to do?"
There used to be a lot of alternative platforms on the market, Sailfish, for example, had a few good phones, and there would be a Sailfish 3 soon. Their model of selling an OS from Xperia X is interesting, and it definitely wasn't a failure - a lot of people bought it, to the point that they are considering this as a primary model.
But apart from going to competitors there is a lot of things you can do - an example would be a lot of public pressure over Google.
It's really sad that BlackBerry OS10 had been discontinued.
The problem is that privacy advocates have poisoned the well using extreme language to characterize benign use of user data so many times people have entirely tuned out privacy concerns. Including the real and legitimate issues that need to be addressed legislatively.
Privacy matters. A lot. But those campaigning against all cookies and customer loyalty cards do immensely more harm than good.
I've felt this way for a long time. I used to be much more into the privacy community but have turned away from it. Using words like "surveillance" when talking about basic telemetry have just muddied the water, and evidence of wrongdoing is rarely a requirement for outrage.
This was done through Google play services, which by default is turned on "Allow modifying system settings". Methods to prevent this from happening in the future is to not use Google Apps (GApps) on your Android and use alternatives like microG and F-Droid.
And Aurora store (it's on F-Droid), which is basically Google Play, lets you download your purchased apps from Google Play but doesn't require you to have Google Services.
I thought I accidentally turned it on because mine's relatively new and I'm still getting used to it. This is way worse.