This is exactly it. Many people don't realize this when they say Android is not open. But you could install F-Droid, which is a repository of open source Android apps and you could pretty much live without Google at all on Android. You would lose many conveniences but you will still be able to make use of all your phone's smarts.
1) This is really an option for a relatively small part of Android's install base most of whom don't know F-Droid exists, let alone how to install it or why they might want to.
2) Any company wanting to produce a phone on this basis is (a) depending on a lot of other products and organisations and (b) putting out a product with - for instance - a substandard maps product next to the competition.
So yes it's open, but not in the way that I think many would like it to be (that is where a genuinely open phone that the average punter can and does use exists).
I don't think the openness of the desktop world was because of Microsoft. If any other company had taken over, we would've seen pretty much the same thing imo.
In today's mobile world, Apple and others could learn from the drawbacks of the desktop world and implement a "better" system, at least in some respects. It has certainly helped their revenue.
Are you kidding me? They tell me exactly what data they collect and for what purpose. To say that is malware is either extreme sarcasm or extreme stupidity.
I don't see why such a big deal is being made of this. If users want it, they can install the app from the CM website. The Windows app is also being installed from their website.
Google doesn't want people to hold it liable for potential bricking of devices and took it off its store. What's the issue here?
Well for me personally, it's been a long series of small stuff that convinced me that they were an engineering organization first and a for-profit company next.
I remember when Android 2.3 was released and at one of the Google dev conferences, a Google engineer answering a question about why "X feature doesn't exist in stock Anroid" answered that Google thought that was too confusing for the lay user and that one could look to the custom ROM community for adding that feature later. It was something that no large company would ever do it seemed to me, That's the first thing that comes to mind whenever I read something of this nature about Google. I'm sure I could pull up others. But that's the one that comes to mind.
But yeah, that was a more open Google undeniably. Before Larry Page took over. Maybe there were a few oases of ideality hiding the vast curtain of reality. But it gave them a soul and connected people to the company. But that's maybe gone now.
He gave a speech recently where he actually pondered why people wouldn't want to have their health care data public, so it could be shared to advance medical research.
From that I could tell that he's completely out of touch with ordinary people. He simply has no idea that people might be scared of losing their job or being discriminated against because of an illness.
Reminds me of his former girlfriend/date Marissa Mayer, who built a nursery next to her office while telling Yahoo employees they should no longer work from home.
Making the healthcare data public in an anonymised format would not affect people's jobs, unless there is some property of that data that makes it easily identifiable.
Good luck with the anonymisation. It only has to fail once for catastrophic consequences.
Look back to how we handled HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. Enormous amounts of fear (understandable) and utter disgust-filled loathing (not so much). There were politicians calling for AIDS sufferers to be rounded up and put in quarantine camps but refusing to engage in public health initiatives because they thought that warning people to use condoms and engage in safe sex would "promote" homosexuality.
Up until 2010 in Britain, it was legal for a dentist to refuse to take an HIV+ patient even though the professional association for dentists had told dentists that it was safe to use the same procedures around sterilisation and safety. It also made no sense as it just led to people lying about their HIV status to dentists in order to get access to health services.
I know people who have faced discrimination in work over chronic mental health conditions that they are being treated for. People who have held down other jobs perfectly well, who take less sick leave than people without any health conditions. There is still significant social stigma around mental health conditions: nobody considers you morally suspicious if you have, say, eczema or hay fever, but if you have depression or schizophrenia, some will consider you too "risky" to employ etc.
So, yes, "please make all your medical records public" sounds nice. I've spoken to friends who, thanks to people like Schmidt and others breathlessly promoting this kind of thing at TED talks, think that anyone who wishes to actually exercise their medical privacy to be "irrational". And that medical privacy is a silly idea that we wouldn't choose to have now and that we only have for historical reasons. That the bright sparks of Silicon Valley can't see the importance of medical privacy is really concerning—it shows they've failed to look at the history of discrimination and fear-mongering against people with particular health conditions. Or, worse, it shows they've thought about it and don't give a shit about protecting people from mistreatment by both the state and by other individuals based on their health conditions.
Some property of the data that makes it easily identifiable? Such as someone's entire medical history, including age, sex, number of children, and "race"? Just wiping someone's name is not going to "anonymize" that kind of data.
There's something deeper here - Larry Page is thinking in terms of "big data" - "wouldn't it be nice if we could run all kinds of multivariate analyses on everything about everyone?" - but it's fundamentally impossible to do that while preserving anonymity. The same information that might reveal interesting correlations is vulnerable to correlation attacks. Say you wanted to know how nutrition affected immune system response. You'd look at things like height, weight, diet, frequency of minor illness, and rough location (city level, to control illness rate against those around you). To be of any use, the "anonymized" database is going to have to have all those variables correlated per person, which means if I know you're 6'1", eat a lot of bananas, live in Silicon Valley and had a cold last year, I can potentially look you up and find out other things about you.
It's worth remembering that whenever a high-level Googler talks about the social/medical potential of large-scale data analysis like that, that it is inherently hostile to privacy.
I can't speak for the health care industry or medical research - but considering all the other places I've seen people "anonymise" data.. They probably store too much data, that can aid or completely de-anonymise the anonymised data.
Anonymization is really not enough. Some government force Google to anonymize the data after a certain period of time. But I am sure Google engineers are able to piece it all back together without much effort. I don't say they actually do this. They probably comply with the wishes of these governments. I'm just saying they are able to do it. I would be kind of disappointed if they couldn't. What would work better is if the data were aggregated instead of anonymized. But try explaining that to a politician though. Math is usually not something politicians are well versed in and you can pretty much forget about statistics.
I think the problem comes from the fact of treating Google+ like any other social network like Facebook. Google+ is supposed to be an identity layer for all of Google. The fact that they have status update posting, etc is secondary.
Google would like to assign a face, name and phone number to every Google account. And why is that? For various reasons. A face and a name is very valuable for targeted ads. And a phone number associated with every Google account will help Hangouts. Maybe it will enable sending SMS from the web to any phone and also Voice users can cal from the web from their Google account. Thus, Google achieves their aim of disrupting the carriers and making the phone number irrelevant.
Users in China don't have access to the Play Store and aren't even counted among the activations that Google reports. The reason that there is more piracy in China is because of no access to the Play Store.
Apple still haven't even released a console and Apple apologists are already quick to jump on the "Apple invented everything under the sun" train. Why am I not surprised?
If anything, it's Apple that's copying others here.
