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> With Android 10, you’re in control of your privacy.

With privacy being the latest buzzword in the tech industry and all this news about privacy blunders I keep seeing, For Google to market something like this for Android makes you wonder what other nefarious features that have been added to Android that they didn't tell you about.

In terms of privacy, Android 10 instead screams "Upgrade and lose control of your privacy".

3 comments

Actually there are a number of new privacy-enhancing features in this release. Probably the most prominent is that it will help you choose which apps should be able to get location information in the background. Google obviously has a tricky relationship with privacy, but as far as I know Android 10 is strictly better in that regard.

Privacy enhancing towards 3rd party apps, maybe, but towards Google itself OTOH...

As someone trying to manage using an Android phone without Google's services (Play Store et al), they really castrated Android starting with version 8, when you needed the Play Store in order to reliably receive push notifications.

In fact, I'm passively looking for ways to downgrade my phone back to LineageOS 14/Android 7 because of this, but older releases of Lineage aren't easily readily available...

Better would be adopting the permissions controls that LineageOS provides.

You mean Privacy Guard?

Entirely agree. We should educate people that privacy is not something a company can "add" to a product or to an ad like Apple and Google claim. Privacy is not just a "feature", this is whole culture, ideological and technological commitment (and sacrifices and extra challenges) you have to do (like at Purism, Mozilla, GNU, etc.) not some marketing buzzword strategy to put on ads to make more sells.

Privacy is not something you can claim, it is something you must prove through 100% full stack open source code and reproducible builds.

Don't be the reason people think 'privacy nuts' are so. A true pivot to privacy would be an exceptionally good thing for Google.