I beg to differ, sir:
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Yes, please differ - there is a very, very big difference between what Apple (afaik) does and what Google does. I don’t like Apple because of several reasons, and of course I don’t like that they don’t provide secure cloud encryption. But what Google does is some orders of magnitude worse! An Android phone is a multipurpose-sensor that you voluntarily carry with you to measure and report all activity and all aspects of your daily life. There is only one goal: knowing enough about you to predict your behavior in every detail. I very much recommend Shoshana Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism for an understanding of whats going on.
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That is a great read indeed, very much recommended.
Thank you for bringing this up. I had come across a Dutch source with this news just after posting my reply, and it had me doubting to bring it up here. Glad you did it for me 
It raises interesting questions about privacy, that makes me poised to reason about it the same way we reason about security. The first question to ask would be: what is the threat you worry about? Is it government surveillance and their implications for citizen’s freedoms? Or is it (third-party) propaganda - Cambridge Analytica style - effectively manipulating people to take decisions against their own good? The difference between Google (/Facebook) and Apple is that the former possess data sets, provide tools and have a financial incentive to facilitate both, whereas Apple “only” to some degree facilitates the former.
I’ll have people more experienced with Apple products reply on whether iCloud is a mandatory back-up service, and/or whether it can replaced wholesale with a third party back-up solution. If the latter is true, there might be a market for secure, encrypted back-up solutions not covered by e.g. the Patriot Act.
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With iOS you can make an encrypted backup locally on your computer using iTunes and double back up to a USB flash drive. And it works very good. It is not mandatory to use iCloud. Also the iPhone itself is encrypted.
I agree that an iOS has many advantages over Android in terms of privacy. With Android it is part of Googles business model to collect and use user data on a large scale. And this is also the case with stock android. A privacy friendly Android would be a unique selling point.
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Something like that exists already: /e/ (formerly Eelo) first beta is here and it supports FP2!
At least that’s their goal.
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I know, and I’m waiting for it. I now have an iPhoneSE (my FP2 was constantly broken) and in the summer the software support is running out. Then I need a new one, either an iPhone or even better a privacy friendly Android. I will probably buy a Samsung from /e/ if a Fairphone is not able to do so.
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It’s fair to assume that Apple doesn’t have a reason to sell your data because is not their business model, however not only you cannot verify that is actually the case, but there’s also no reason why they shouldn’t start right now. It’s an incredibly profitable market and they have a tight controlled ecosystem with a significant number of users in it. Doesn’t it look really familiar to what Google does with Android to you?
Speaking of similarities, this move looks a heck lot like what Facebook is doing with Whatsapp: end-to-end encrypted messages… but stored unencrypted in Google Drive.
So even if Apple is not making any money out of it (which I doubt), this is by far the biggest evidence we have that they are willing to give out your data one way or another. Privacy-minded folks should consider this, the end goal here is to have companies respect your data whether it’s been sold or given away for free.
Saying that iOS is a better alternative than Android (privacy-wise) is like comparing different light tones of the the same color. They’re technically different but in practice they’re not.
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Apple could do it, but they don’t do it, because that’s a selling point for Apple.
If it’s all the same, please give me the link to Google’s completely offline encryptable backup program for Android smartphones.
but apple is (also) happy to help with government censorship
Here it is, although I’m surprised to find out it’s not available from Android 10 onwards.
https://source.android.com/security/encryption/full-disk
However, this doesn’t invalidate my point. In fact one could argue this is a smart move to cut the middle man and allow Apple to sell data directly. They may not do it, but now they have this advantage should they choose to.
But conspiracies aside, there’s actually one paragraph in this article you linked here that illustrates my point nicely:
“Right now opt-in rates to share data with apps when they’re not in use are often below 50%, said Benoit Grouchko, who runs the ad tech business Teemo that creates software for apps to collect location data. Three years ago those opt-in rates were closer to 100%, he said. Higher opt-in rates prevailed when people weren’t aware that they even had a choice. Once installed on a phone, many apps would automatically start sharing a person’s location data.”
You see, the reason I mentioned “they are the same” is because even if Google didn’t provide full-encryption in their phones: it wouldn’t matter, because people don’t know about it and won’t use it anyway. Same issue as with Whatsapp as per my previous post, and precisely one of the main criticisms towards Telegram (which doesn’t enable E2E by default).
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There is disk encryption on Android 10 : https://www.wired.com/story/android-10-privacy-security-features/ . I don’t understand your first sentence.
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Ah, I misunderstood this statement then, from the official Android documentation. I thought full-disk encryption would be replaced entirely, and that file-based would apply individual files only. It did seem very weird but now it makes sense, thank you.
Note: Devices running Android 7.0–9 support full-disk encryption. New devices running Android 10 and higher must use file-based encryption.
There is no E2EE for Android backups in Google Drive either.
Android has FDE, as does iOS.
The evil multinational company named Sony does it:
https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/
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Do you happen to know if Sony has the stuff up on their page as soon as a new model is released?
And unfortunately the links to the open source archive and software binaries just give a network violation on my firefox.
Without deeper knowledge it looks “just” like developer information, not flashable images. But as I said, some links I can’t check because they give errors at the moment for me.
True, on select Sony devices you are able to run SFOS (Sailfish OS). Which is heavily based on Maemo (and standard Linux desktop) but not completely FOSS.
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This discussion about Apple privacy is interesting but is going a bit off topic.
If I can summarize and add my opinion to what’s going here:
- Some people are disappointed because they want a phone respecting their privacy and the Fairphone 3 doesn’t allow that yet, as no version of Android without Google services, which track the user, is provided.
- The disappointment is especially high because the Fairphone 2 was provided with Fairphone Open OS, a version without the Google services. So, it puts the FP3 as a worse option than the FP2 right now (end of Januray, 2020),
- Even if it was not available on day 1 on the FP2, Fairphone Open OS has been released a few months later. We currently have no indication, roadmap or any information from Fairphone about a release of FOOS for the FP3 (please correct me if that’s wrong), leading to think that this could not happen
- It looks like Fairphone delegated (subtrade? sorry I’m not a native english speaker) a lot of work for the FP3. That’s maybe the reason why they are late. Or maybe it’s even the reason they won’t provide it, who knows?
- The shame is even bigger because thanks to the providing of FOOS for the FP2, other OSes have been made available by privacy friendly communities such as /e/, Ubuntu Touch or Sailfish OS. To be able to run those OSes is a very important selling point for many power-users out there. If the Fairphone 3 never allows that, that phone would definitely be a regression compared to the FP2
So please Fairphone, provide a boot image, or at least give information about what you plan to do and an estimate date!
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.Yep, but that’s a community effort achieved with a lot of hacking. It doesn’t send any good signal from Fairphone unfortunately.
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