What google essentially sale is manipulation: they make money by changine your behavior, which is a extermely dangerous business in a democratic society. What makes it even more dangerous are

It is a for-profit company, which means people with more money have more power to manipulate the general public
It caters to U.S. government (since it is based in the U.S.), which is one of the most imperialistic governments today, with a terrible record of over-surveillance.
Everything can be hacked, all the information that is stored will be leaked sooner or later. And these data can easily fall into the wrong hand; in fact, they tends to fall into the wrong hand.

[–] bitsplease@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's all perfectly sensible things to be concerned about. But given that we're talking about an android app - if you're eligible to use the app, Google almost certainly already has all your data anyways.

Yeah I'm sure there's a tiny subsection of the people in these discussion who have custom ROMs flashed, but the vast majority are posting about Google tracking them on a google phone - or (even more annoyingly) posting about it from a phone that doesn't even support the app, and so doesn't remotely affect them

[–] baseless_discourse@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You raise a valid point, ~~but your original answer, to me, seems to normalize tracking to some extend: "since lawnmowing company dont care about your data, hence ads that tracks you is nit a big deal", which is not the case. ~~

EDIT: I thought I was replying to someone else.

I think a better argument is that "since you are already on android, so google will have all your data anyway".

That being said, one final bit of nits, even if you are on a google phone, google probably dont watch your every move. With every new place to interact with ads, there is more chance people will be tracked. Finally, I think the more one relying on google service the harder is to move them on a degoogled platform. So adding google ads to an app is definitely not harmless. But like you said, these probably dont matter to 95% of people.

[–] bitsplease@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You raise a valid point, but your original answer, to me, seems to normalize tracking to some extend: “since lawnmowing company dont care about your data, hence ads that tracks you is nit a big deal”, which is not the case.

I think you're getting me mixed up with someone else - I'm just a rando who jumped in

I think a better argument is that “since you are already on android, so google will have all your data anyway”.

That was in fact exactly what i was arguing

google probably dont watch your every move

They do in fact watch your every move - Ok i was taking that one a bit literally, but honestly they really already do know everything they need to know. And let's not forget that everything on your Lemmy is public - Do you really think that Google, Meta, and the rest of the usual suspects don't have data crawlers on the fediverse hoovering up data and linking it to their existing shadow profiles?

I 100% agree that it would be best for Sync to have absolutely no tracking, but I'm just a bit baffled at everyone acting like this is some nefarious thing that Sync is doing that is in anyway novel. Do y'all really have 0 apps installed with google ads? Do y'all really all have custom ROMs flashed on your phone? None of you are reading this comment from Google Chrome, Edge, or Safari?

My point isn't that ad tracking is good, it's that saying that Sync is garbage because it has ads (and so, by necessity also has ad tracking) is almost certainly hypocritical in the case of every person whose saying it. "Let he without spyware on his phone cast the first stone" or something like that lol

[–] yoshipunk123456@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

I have no apps with google ads on my phone i run lineageos and all my apps come from fdroid except for a copy of volume booster goodev with the ads patched out(because i couldnt find a volume booster on fdroid)