My post relates very much to this one which is a month old. Like their Samsung device, this feature is now coming to my Redmi device also. Today only I received the email with subject, "Your Android devices will soon join the Find My Device network".

As always, the real privacy nightmare stuff is always hidden in between the large boring paragraphs or the fine print as they say. Here is the part which I think is the most problematic:

How it works

Devices in the network use Bluetooth to scan for nearby items. If other devices detect your items, they’ll securely send the locations where the items were detected to Find My Device. Your Android devices will do the same to help others find their offline items when detected nearby.

So, your devices are also supposed to co-operate by sending data to other devices which may want their location detected while offline. We are made to believe here that this data pertains to only our location and nothing else but once this thing becomes too ubiquitous, one can easily see the scope for surveillance capitalism by the powers that be?

This is very much like the Microsoft's recall scenario, I don't see much difference between this and that. At least there, the data is very much still on the user's device and doesn't leave its shores, this is arguably even worse. For such technology to be palatable to the power user, they must at the very least, be prepared to open source this code. I think recall would have still got some acceptance had Microsoft made the code open source. This whole "you trust me but I won't trust you" business is highly cynical and doesn't usually have a long shelf life.

I've been trying to reduce my reliance on all things Google, and one of the big ones is password management. I've tried several times to make the jump, but every time I start researching options I'm overwhelmed by the selection. There are a lot of popular options out there, and I really don't have the time/energy to endure a misstep. So without a clear idea of which manager will check all of my boxes, I end up bailing on the process and keep using chrome's built in option.

So to start, here's what I like about Chrome:

• Automatically offers to store passwords without extra clicks
• Autofills automatically where it can, and gives me an easy choice when it can't
• Works everywhere I need passwords. (basically everywhere I browse the internet since chrome works everywhere)
• Minimal overhead. This is hard to beat since Chrome just includes it, so I'm fine with a little extra setup if necessary.

I used to use keepass portable on a thumb drive (I want to say circa ~2009ish), but it became really inconvenient as my usage shifted more to mobile devices.

I see this as a first step to also reducing my reliance on Chrome so I can start to consider other browsers. Right now I feel locked in to Google's ecosystem, but I know I can break it up if I don't get too bogged down by choice. Much appreciate any help. :)