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Are There Any Smartphones That Respect Privacy?

An anonymous reader writes "After many years I am finally considering entering the smartphone era. Within the mainstream, there seem to be four OS choices: Windows, Android, Blackberry, or iOS: Android comes out as clear winner to me. However, all of the choices in one way or another require sharing a lot of personal information in the Cloud run by their respective corporations. Let alone Blackberry's centralized mail servers; there is no way to have an Android smartphone working decently without sharing all of your contacts, calendar appointments, and other stuff with Google. While Android is less intrusive than iOS, the lack of privacy remains quite annoying no matter how comfortable it is to have your own calendar and contacts centralized. In 2011 is there any option, other than living in a cave, to keep one's own life private while enjoying the wonders of modern smartphone apps?"

3 of 478 comments (clear)

  1. Security is NOT an issue with The Cloud. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.

    The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.

    And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.

    My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.

  2. Re:Windows Phone 7 is a good solution by PerlJedi · · Score: 4, Funny

    It also doesn't leak data to Google like Android does, it doesn't have the malware problem that Android has

    The only reason Windows phone 7 doesn't have the malware issues is that there are only like 2 people in north america that use them. If Windows phone 7 ever gets even 50% of the north american users of either iOS or android,it will have such a malware problem that I'd bet you'd be better off putting your social security number on TV than carrying one.

  3. Re:Windows Phone 7 is a good solution by youn · · Score: 5, Funny

    Google Is Your Friend

    citation needed :p

    --
    Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that :p