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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?"
Microsoft may be many things, but they have always respected privacy.
That's why Microsoft got a lot of criticism because of the phoning home feature of WGA right? Or that's why MS gives your info to the government even without your consent. Or that's why Microsoft collected PC and phones locations in ther Web map services...
You should inform yourself a little more, all that glitters is not gold
And I'm serious. While not as versatile towards own-hosted solutions as the old Windows Mobiles, it's still light years beyond Android and iOS. You can easily use your own Exchange server to sync and share your contacts, calendar and other stuff, which gives you true privacy. It also doesn't leak data to Google like Android does, it doesn't have the malware problem that Android has [techcrunch.com] and the phone itself is a full smart phone with an great UI (Windows Mobile somewhat started lacking in this in recent years).
Stop spreading false information.
Android is possible to be configured from the beginning only to use any exchange server as well. You do not need to use any Google services or applications if you do not want to do so.
What comes to malware, so long most serious problems has been in third party resources for applications. And those few in official market, have not been so bad or anything serious. Still, I don't reject that there ain't possibility or anything else. but it is now so widely spread FUD about it that it is already a non-proofed truth.
And Windows Phone 7 GUI shares opinions very well. And that matter is out of the line here in this topic as well, what is about question of privacy concerning contacts and addresses of everyones elses who phone owners has stored to own phone. So far Windows Phone GUI has nothing to do with it, so bringing it to hype it as biased user does not help at all in this discussion.
When you can buy a Windows Phone where there are no single Microsoft service or application installed or need to be used, then come back to talk with the GUI.
Android is more secure and protects much better way the users privacy than your "Windows Phone GUI is awesome" phone does. (The other topic is then how much it is protected or informed the user about risks and same discussion can be gone trough again with any software system out there).
The only time when you need contact with other servers is to download and install apps, which imo is a stupid decision fueled by iOS and Android doing it that way. Old Windows Mobiles always allowed you to install apps the way you wanted, the desktop Windows way. However, I guess that provides some extra security.
Android does not force to use only online services to install applications. User can download application, save it where wanted (dropbox, FTP, webdav, microSD... you name it) and then install it with filemanager to Android device.
The one problem is with Android Market is that you can not download directly from there. But you can install application from there using any web browser (desktop, laptop or even iOS devices or Windows Phone phone) and it gets installed to your Android phone next time you have internet connection (WiFi, 3G etc) and it was activated to Google services and you have Market application installed with Google profile.
So don't spread lies that Android does not allow installing applications with old fashion way as it does. Even I do so sometimes when I want to install non-official Google Maps version where is just enabled navigation every country. And I don't even need a any Google account for that.
PS. N9 does not have MeeGo in it. It has Harmattan. Harmattan and MeeGo are two different products and development branches. Harmattan were code name for Maemo 6.0 (5.0 is in N900) and MeeGo was project of Maemo 5.0 + Moblin.
So do not talk about MeeGo when talking about N9 but only with Harmattan aka Maemo as that is used in it.
Agreed. If you want absolute privacy, your own BES is the way to go.
And you can get BES Express for free (you lose some of management policies, but the core security stuff is there) though you'll need a mail/calendaring/contact server to hook it up to, which means (if you want to avoid Exchange) probably VMware's Zimbra.
--srj/mmv
A decade? Windows XP was 2003,
Bullshit. XP was 2001, Vista was 2007. And he did say "like a decade", so fine, he rounded up. 6 years is like an eternity in between OSes anyway; it certainly felt like a decade by the time the long-promised "Longhorn" became reality.
And Vista was a huge success too.
Laughable. Probably the most hated OS released by anyone since Windows Millenium.
How long between vista and 7? how long between 7 and 8? How about windows 98, me, and 2000?
He was specifically only talking about the lag between XP and Vista. And you're missing his point entirely - even though it took 6 years, negating the "speed to market" point, the OS still sucked, so "quality of software" not really a valid point either. Basically what I'm saying is he ripped you apart in two short sentences, it went over your head, and I just wasted 3 minutes of my life explaining it to you.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.