On the whole, I’m satisfied that Lineage OS, as I use it, is preventing nearly all of Google’s data collection. I don’t install or use any Google services, I don’t enable A-GPS, I don’t use Chromium or the built-in browser. I could eliminate more arcane aspects of data collection – like the Internet connectivity check – if I wanted to take the trouble.
I don’t think that taking reasonable precautions to avoid becoming part of Google’s data collection economy makes me a tinfoil-hatter. Nevertheless, I would probably use GrapheneOS instead, if I had devices that supported it. Ironically, if I wanted to use GrapheneOS, I’d have to buy Google-branded mobile devices, which is an irony that really stings.
↫ Kevin Boone
The existence of Android versions like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS, and similar, other de-Googled mobile operating systems is absolutely vital. The market is dominated by Google Android and iOS, and since full alternatives that aren’t Android or iOS are effectively impossible, de-Googled Android is the best we’re going to get. Regulators must ensure that banks, government ID applications, popular messaging platforms, and similarly crucial applications work 100% reliably on de-Googled Android, and do not require Google Play Services in any way, shape, or form.
In The Netherlands, there are basically three banks that control the market, and there’s really just one messaging application that rules the country – WhatsApp – and their use is effectively required to participate in society. Consequently, these applications and platforms should be accessible by as many people as possible, and that definitely includes de-Googled Android devices.
Being alive should not be taxed by Apple or Google.
Whatsapp? It would seem a revolution changing everyone to Signal is in order in The Nether.
Nuking Meta from orbit is more likely needed. Anytime Meta announces their newest batch of shenanigans, a large swath of Whatsapp users declares to leave this app.
Then I get messages that 8 people go to Telegram, 4 to Signal, 1 wants to use Viber and 2 Wire. The rest stays put. End result, I have 4 more messaging apps on my Android phone and after about 3 weeks everybody is back on Whatsapp, because it’s inconvenient to have your contacts scattered over multiple networks. The network effects are just too strong.
We need a world-wide, government mandated, federated, non-exclusive, royalty free messaging protocol, file share (photo and video) and contact list standard. That way it doesn’t matter on which app you like to send and receive messages. It will break the silos and foster competition. I know, XMPP/Jingle all over again and hell will freeze over before it happens.
> federated, non-exclusive, royalty free messaging protocol,
As of today Matrix is the closest solution for this. And there are a lot of clients that you can use (Element, Nheko, Fluffuchat et al). You have also clients that integrate with Whatsaspp, Signal and most other messaging stuff.
My first reaction is not to react because people will believe what they want to believe. But I’m starting to realize that’s wrong.
I have to ask: Why? What is the benefit?
Is it the ad targeting? I get to use Google for free in return for some ads. In fact, I can turn off personalized ads at no cost to myself.
The trend in OSNews articles over the years (I’ve been reading since around 2000) has been more and more political (trying to influence what affiliations people should have towards technical organizations). Large organizations should be held accountable, but this is a little ridiculous. When a large organization make a misstep they should be called out on it. Instead every mentionable thing Google or Apple do these days is interpreted in the most pessimistic way possible. Crying wolf will reduce the impact of the articles that people should actually pay attention to. It is an understandable reaction to start speaking louder and louder when you feel you’re not being heard, but quite detrimental to what you have to say and how credible it will sound.
If you don’t like Google yourself that’s fine. But if you’re trying to steer the public away from it I think you’re doing a great disservice. Consider just this: Google has been stellar in trying to protect users from hackers, with things like its Advanced Protection Program. It has also been the most transparent organization when it comes to outside data access requests (and it has pushed hard on that front). It is where you want your grandparents to have their email accounts. It’s where journalists should as well.
This is what it comes down to: there are real, rational, well defined reasons to use Google services. On the other side there is very little that is reasoned.
Why do I care? This is my emotional reaction to 2 things:
1. Google has done way more good than harm and for the last several years have received little recognition for it (there are really good people inside Google that are working _really_ hard to make Google a stand up company, and there are way more good people than bad).
2. It’s sad to see the current privacy FUD campaign make gains so effectively, especially on a site I respected growing up. I guess it’s an interesting lesson in human psychology.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Google, before being laid off.
Tech fans tend to also be sci-fi fans. And in sci-fi, you always need a good guy and a bad guy.
Sometimes they become caricatures.
I do get your frustration at that. I often get the same. What I find more worrying is how the “good guys” then get a free ride and aren’t held to the same standards.
cheemosabe,
It’s not just about ads though, it’s the monopolization.
It would be like if streaming services were controlled exclusively by a corporation with an absolute monopoly on streaming. Somebody could come in and say “I didn’t see the problem because the ads make the service cheaper and you can turn off personalized ads…” but that kind of misses the point.
I don’t doubt that employees such as yourself are (or at least were) working to do good, but it doesn’t actually do much to refute real privacy and competition issues. There are still legitimate concerns with the tech giants regardless and this shouldn’t be seen as an attack on the employees who work there but
Adurbe,
The good guy/bad guy narrative is probably too simplistic.. It’s just that monopolies start to behave quite differently when they comfortably control the market than when they are competing in it on a level playing field. For me it leaves a bad taste when a giant companies exploiting their dominant position rather than focusing on customer needs. To be clear it’s not specific to google, many dominant companies in general start embracing dark-patterns and disliked business models, because “profit”.
I was arguing against the privacy concern. I actually think it’s a good idea to have alternatives to Google Apps, but for other reasons (I find them too large, and would like open source alternatives).
Regarding the monopolistic behavior concern, it’s a more valid one. Though I would argue that there are benefits to having a benevolent large company (of course that if it’s too successful it’s questionable whether it can avoid ending up a monopoly). Google I think is the closest equivalent to what Bell Labs was. Without Google we’d probably have to deal with trying to break AirPlay in order to cast to TVs (there were a couple of alternatives I forget at the moment that weren’t widely used). We’d more than likely still not have a competitive royaly free video codec. There wouldn’t be any open source commercial operating system, or the myriad open source drivers and filesystems that followed. Google even outdid Sun with Go which they released explicitly completely unencumbered (https://go.dev/PATENTS). I think it’s probably safe to say Google did much more for open source than Sun did.
We’ll probably soon be in that reality. I have to wonder how the world will be better. I’m not sure everyone understands the alternative service providers we’ll be going back to.
Perhaps in an ideal world academic institutions would be more successful in creating Unixes and supporting them long-term (though I don’t see how) and more focused companies like SoundCloud could also contribute in some smaller way to open source software in their field. I just don’t see how eliminating/breaking up Google would bring us any closer to any such world. We’ll just be going back to less good corporations and governmental institutions controlling standards.
The thing that bothers me most (other than Adurbe’s point about the “good guys” getting a free ride) is that people are dismissing the real issues with Google (and instead following the FUD). Personally I’m disappointed that Google has stopped promoting open standards. They could have made at least the DRM-free part of Chromecast open. They killed XMPP and then Google Wave. We sadly live in a world where standards (except for the lowest level ones) are dying. I’m really happy with the recent success of ActivityPub. But no, let’s hate Google for cookies (which they’re actually trying to get right).
cheemosabe,
The problem is that google’s business model is fundamentally incompatible with user privacy. They give themselves a competitive advantage with advertisers by collecting mountains of user data. This agenda fundamentally impacts all the software and services they design. Between two solutions, one that keeps user’s data private and another that shares it with google, google will prefer the later. Between solutions that are federated and give users the ability to control where information goes versus those that make us dependent on google, google will prefer the later. Of course google is going to do this because it’s a business and it’s out to make money, but I don’t think we should pretend that google has our privacy interests in mind because they don’t. Their view of privacy is hypocritical: “we believe you have the right to keep your data private from others. We just make an exception for ourselves because we want your data to help us sell ads”.
I would also like FOSS alternatives, or at least old school local applications don’t siphon data into corporate silos.
Neither apple airplay nor google chromecast are open. I’ve got complaints for chromecast too. I don’t like that google scuttled HDMI support on android to upsell chromecast. I shouldn’t be required to run a chrome browser to stream to my TV, this is not a logical design requirement, and yet google designed it this way. This is the sort of vendor locking that I consider harmful. Miracast would be better for wireless HDMI, it’s not tied to apple and google services, but unfortunately the apple/google duopoly mean that most of our devices don’t natively support the standard and defeating it’s purpose 🙁
So although I agree with you that apple are guilty of this, so are google.
That’s an interesting question….sun gave us loads of FOSS, possibly even to it’s own detriment. Google gave us android, or more specifically AOSP, VP9, chromium. That’s fair enough, although I think google’s motives may have been more pragmatic than altruistic. VP9 came about over their desire to not pay licensing fees. I’m glad they did it, but it did have a self-serving purpose. AOSP helped spur the uptake by manufactures, but it’s significantly gutted as a usable phone without google’s proprietary bits that make it android. I’m glad to have an open source Chromium, but it is a browser designed to push google control & services over the web. I don’t say these things to diminish google’s contributions, a contribution is a contribution. But it’s not as obvious to me that they’re on the same level as Sun’s contributions.
I agree with you about all these things. I don’t think these things happened simply because google threw in the towel. They happened because federated technology and open vendor neutral interoperability are actually bad for dominant technology giants. They prefer technology that keeps us attached to their exclusive services.
I won’t deny that there is google hate, but I also think there’s a lot of valid criticism too over privacy and control issues and a lot of us want more competition.
I do not follow any of your points on privacy. To make this short, as I mentioned before, Google gives you the option to disable personalised ads.
In the end it’s easy to avoid Google. If you really want to, just stop using it altogether.
cheemosabe,
The privacy issue isn’t just about what they say they do once they have user data, but the fact that they design technology to hoard so much private user data in the first place.
Google has unprecidented access to our digital lives, they know who we contact are, where we go online and even track us in the physical world. And the tracking isn’t just when we visit google properties either, their widgets can track us across many 3rd party websites too. Google’s hidden bugs/trackers are really creepy, invading privacy without user consent. As for location tracking, a few years ago google lost a court case for tracking the location android users who had explicitly opted out, which affected me personally. They buy up private data from 3rd parties like credit card transactions. They even wanted to become a platform for medical records, which I’m so glad didn’t pan out due to push back.
So, as to the point that letting users disable personalized ads, no that doesn’t even come close to dismissing the privacy concerns. It is important to have a public debate. And it’s not just google, microsoft has been steadily turning windows into a user tracking platform too. Unfortunately left to their own vices, they only do whatever is best for them without regard to privacy.. It’s how we ended up here.
I agree with you. The big tech companies have enormous resources and, like most profit driven entities, they tend to act in their own self-interest to the detriment of the rest of us. They require scrutiny and deserve to be called out whenever they act badly. That said, they are also made of of people ( lots of them ) and have a myriad of faces. All of us benefit from their works tremendously. We do not need to trust them or apologize for them to acknowledge that they do a lot of good. They should be encouraged and maybe even be cheered on sometimes. That does not mean giving them a pass or turning a blind eye. It just means that tech companies, like the rest of the world, are not entirely black and white.
I am not a fan of the “everybody bigger and richer than me is inherently evil in all ways” view of the world. A lot of the social media I see even vilifies individual land owners in the same way. We should not be so cynical and negative all the time. No better world is going to be created from that. Acting positively should be rewarded. Acting negatively should be discouraged. There should not be a list of “others” that it is ok to be universally negative towards all the time without context. That is just tribalism ( basically exactly the thing we are complaining about ).
You’re right, it is political
> I have to ask: Why? What is the benefit?
A potential future is the benefit.
Imagine an authoritarian regime change in your country, however implausible that sounds now. Now imagine that regime wanting to do a great purge. Forcing companies holding the data to give it up is a no brainer.
And you never know what the criteria will be. Take Pol Pot, killing everyone wearing glasses. You couldn’t have imagined that in your wildest dreams before it happened.
The thing is, data collected this way is “forever” and is potentially easily searchable.
I really like using this example: https://medium.com/@hansdezwart/during-world-war-ii-we-did-have-something-to-hide-40689565c550
The other political argument : us being computer litterate, we would like a say in what our devices are actually doing. Next up in this political fight are car manufacturers.
> Google has done way more good than harm and for the last several years have received little recognition for it
Maybe, but it stopped playing nice with the open Internet quite a while back. Killing XMPP support for gchat (users could chose which client they prefer) being one of those events. The same with gmail. The IMAP implementation is pretty butchered. Vendor lock-in is very apparent in the google ecosystem.
> It’s where journalists should as well.
Definitely not. The requirements for journalists is that communication data is never accessible to anyone, ever… Even through legal means. See 1st paragraph, and look up news from Slovakia…
Agreed on standards.
Regarding journalists, unfortunately I don’t think there’s an alternative today (see Groklaw and Lavabit). With Google you’ll probably get the best protection available to journalists that aren’t themselves hackers (protection against authoritarian governments and other bad actors).
Thom Holwerda,
It’s become quite clear that the market has consolidated around the google & apple app duolpoly. Without intervention, things are probably stuck this way for the foreseeable future.
F-droid is great for foss apps, but it won’t include your banking/government/travel/store/streaming/etc apps. Nearly all 3rd party android software publishers use google’s app store exclusively. For me, this is probably the biggest detractor. of running a google free device. It sucks when the only recourse is to find pirate sources for apps. A true de-googled experience is not very practical for those who still want to download (non google) apps. It would be like being forced to download all windows software from microsoft. Alternatives like the yalp store can download official packages from google, but still require a google account.
Most applications are both available on the eos store or the aurora store which can access the google play store using anonymous accounts. They update automatically. Probably not ideal from a security point I can imagine but it does work flawlessly. At least for non google apps.
thomas,
While “anonymous accounts” is a feature, this approach fails quite often because google are quick to throttling/blocking those accounts and you can’t download anything.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LineageOS/comments/pz48p0/cant_download_anything_from_aurora_store/
We need something better, I just don’t know how we get there. Something needs to happen to open things up because it’s not good now.
There is a project called Obtainium, that tries to integrate the installation and update of all apps that are published directly by their owners – i.e. bypass of Play Store and F-Droid.
Affects those published in all the gits and directly on owner’s websites.
I have never needed a bank app here in sweden.
Disclaimer: I have a Google Pixel 4a phone running /e/OS.
It doesn’t sting for me, because the two things are so different they’re almost incomparable. One is personal user information data being streamed to Google all day every day, providing them an absolutely enormous source of revenue. The other is a one time purchase of between $200 and $1000 or whatever, for a modern piece of electronics that I own and I control.
Here’s the kicker, we’re pretty much reliant on the benevolence of Google to continue to sell hardware that can have its os replaced with an alternative that does not include it. This kind of reminds me of the period of time when chrome allowed ad blockers to be plugins. Do not be surprised if this is taken away in the near future.
My wife uses a Fairphone 4 + e/os (directly from murena) and all applications (banking, apple music, whatsapp etc..), whatever niche app we tried, work flawlessly. We get the apps from Fdroid, or eos store and only if required from aurora store in anonymous mode. No issues so far.
Not all smartphones can bypass google safety nets, There is a list of devices that supports bypassing it on eos website. Probably due to the android version supported, older devices seem less compatible.
I’ve been using CyanogenMod and LineageOS ever since I switched to a smartphone as my primary phone in 2012. I won’t rehash all the arguments here about whether this is a reasonable response to a reasonable threat model given limited time to spend on personal IT stuff. I’ve had my eye on GrapheneOS, but I’ve never found the benefits compelling enough to attempt to switch and get all my custom workflows working again. (It helps that I’m already using Pixels because of the long security updates.)
Perhaps notable: I run almost all my proprietary apps on a second Android phone running the stock OS, which I keep powered off except when I’m using it. This way, the proprietary apps work normally but the time window for potential snooping is reduced. (The second phone gets internet access via the first phone’s Wi-Fi hotspot.) I realize I can only get away with this setup because I only need the proprietary apps occasionally; for example, it wouldn’t work if people expected me to be constantly reachable on WhatsApp, like Thom said. Even then, if you use a second phone, you can focus on finding workarounds for the smaller number of proprietary apps/services that you need continuous access to. GrapheneOS’s Google Play Services sandbox could provide a useful option; IIUC, it can be turned on and off more quickly than a second phone and even while it’s on, it can’t collect as much data as a stock OS can.
I would love to see more mainstream apps just work on de-Googled Android, but I’m not prepared to spend my own sweat and tears pushing for it right now. Sorry. 🙁
Matt McCutchen,
Like you, I also needed a 2nd googlefied phone, not because I wanted it, but because an employer forced the issue. If you’re an extremist, maybe you can make do with degoogled alternative lineage/e/graphene/whatever, but it’s obvious that the market is strangled.
I’ve given up a lot of conveniences to use degoogled lineageos. It’s not even the fault of alternatives, we just live in in a world where the top gets everything and being in the the long tail is hard.
Alfman,
Maybe I am missing something but I see zero difficulties in using the e/os phone with any other apps. Still I see a lot of comments on how difficult it is to run a degoogled phone. I am starting to think either I am not as degoogled as I think either e/os is doing a very good job (or will run into legal trouble).
One point is that we came from ios and without using any google services which might be easier than coming from an android already deeply integrated with google applications and google services (photos, contacts, etc). I have not tried to move such casual google users from my family to e/os since.
But I agree this remains niche and not so straightforward.
thomas,
I don’t know, given your testimony, maybe I should give /e/ a try. I use lineageos with microg, which replaces google features with independent implementations of them. It works fairly well (with certain exceptions), The other way to run lineageos is with google gapps, but I don’t really see the point in flashing new firmware only to put google’s software. back on it.
I never really embraced google or apple services because ideologically I feel users should have more control over their own hardware and data. Without this mindset, I know it would be easy to cave and end up getting trapped. inside their ecosystems.
“Regulators must ensure that banks, government ID applications, popular messaging platforms, and similarly crucial applications work 100% reliably on de-Googled Android, and do not require Google Play Services in any way, shape, or form.”
You’ll just get more Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in that case and, as an android developer myself, I completely agree with that decision. Just leave us alone and use your web guys.
Well actually the purpose of Lineage wasn’t being degoogled in the first place. To me it seems that the purpose was rather to have something which has lot longer lifetime (in the sense of the updates of course) than the vendor-supported mere 2years.
De-googling option is just a nice side-effect. Although — without hesitation — also important one.
I try to use phone for around 4 years, and usually with official (yes i’m looking at you Samsung and HTC!) firmware after 2 years the phones were barely usable (I guess now the situation looks better). Installing LineageOS gave them second life.
Currently the irony is that there are so many vendors and each vendor has bazillions of models so that it’s impossible for such a project to support them. So in the end they focus on higher-end models only.
Now you can buy a Pixel phone and enjoy many years of monthly updates. Yes, most of these years will “just” be security updates, but nevertheless.
a_very_dumb_nickname,
Security updates are the most important ones.
But I do think the tight coupling and device specific OS are extremely problematic. The OS developers and hardware manufacturers should be totally independent from each other. Owners shouldn’t be tethered to the manufacturer with regressive incentives for updates. It sucks for consumers, but all kinds of manufacturers have been learning to use and optimize planned obsolescence for their business model, it’s everywhere. With more generic computer,s, owners can give their computers second and third lives without their manufacturer’s permission and without having to be a hacker.
Ideally the mobile industry would work this way too. It’s been great for consumers and it would improve mobile longevity and flexibility by a lot. This hasn’t happened over several decades though. And it won’t either because manufactures have been the beneficiaries of this status quo: owner control is bad for hardware sales. Nobody would be replacing hardware early until it breaks. Software limitations and incompatibilities give manufacturers new sales opportunities if existing phones can’t be updated by owners.