[thoraway1010]

For everyone one of the apple / google huge privacy breach headlines / comments some quick thoughts.

Google and Apple can at least plausibly infrastructure an anonymized data collection service and control access to it reasonably.

- You probably should worry more about the per user per connection logs your "loggless" VPN provider keeps in crappy open to the world datastores.

- The data sniffing and tracking your own ISP is doing.

- The uninstallable malware / bloatware etc that comes on huge number of phones built by third parties (ie, not google or apple).

Whenever I sign up for a "free" service (like google analytics or its equivalent for android) I am under almost no illusion that google isn't also using that data to help track users access the web target them, figure out what ads to show on my site (if I let them) etc etc.

And yes, we will find out that facebook tracks the URLs of sites people share on their platform and "snoopes" on that to figure out popularity trends. And twitter will watch tweet metrics related to their competitors. I wonder if we will get some headlines over those issues.

Finally, some folks come up with weird threat models - google is out to get me and now they can. Heads up, google could get you before this as well if they cared to. Can you imagine a govt having google's power. That would be a near dictatorship!