Slashdot Mirror
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?"
As is running CyanogenMod on a rooted Android phone.
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.
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.
Is it really that easy to set up your own Exchange server? Does everyone around here keep a Windows server in a coloc somewhere so they can run Exchange?
The reason for this is simple too. Microsoft may be many things, but they have always respected privacy.
Really? Always?
http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/02/08/08/0923231.shtml
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/users-outraged-over-windows-live-privacy-violations
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/microsft-investigates-hotmail-privacy-breach.ars
And that's just what I found in a quick google search.
In spite of that, email communication and web communication is encrypted/decrypted on the BlackBerry smartphone itself, so RIM (the company that does BlackBerry) can't snoop into your data contents even if they wanted to. That's why some authoritarian countries around the world couldn't quite understand - they demanded RIM hand over the secret keys to let them read any message contents, which they just assumed RIM must have, even though they don't. Similarly, with the riots in Britain earlier this year, the authorities complained that the rioters were co-ordinating using BlackBerry phones, and they couldn't intercept those communications. To me, that's a strong recommendation for a BlackBerry if you want security and privacy.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
You can easily use a 3rd party calendar app.
I also just discovered Permission Denied this morning. It (theoretically) revokes specific permissions from already installed apps. Handy for when you want an app that asks for location permission and such but you know it doesn't actually need it. Whether or not it actually does what it says it does, I don't know...
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.
Most of the security bashing is related to drive-by installs and related security holes, where software gets installed without user interaction. And the ease of which installed software can escalate its own permissions, and the hardness of running Windows as non-privileged user.
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.
I'm afraid you're the one, that inadvertantly or otherwise, is spreading false information. Some models of Android phone will not let you even use the calendar or contacts unless you sign up with Google. One my Acer AOD255 I could not get anywhere without signing up with Google, but at least that doesn't have contacts from my SIM card to share. On my Acer Liquid Metal I found that the 2.3.5 image did indeed turn on sharing by default. It gives you the option not to sync contacts with Google but they're shared by default and there are a bunch of different options that will easily trip up even an experienced user. Background data, auto sync, then sync on each of Phone SIM and Google account.
What is worse is that import and export to SD card are broken - they put all numbers in US number format with dashes hard coded, which makes Australian numbers look wrong and is confusing for an Australian user use to dashes in different location. The stupid thing is import from SIM is not broken and does not do any such hard coding. The easiest way around it is to sync with Google and correct it there since trying to correct it in phone is awkward. When you try to delete a dash it also deletes the preceding number, so you have to delete it and re-enter that number (which is error prone and slow on a small touch screen - in fact if you have more than a handful of contacts it is unworkable). The only other way is to write an app to fix the number format. I found one that did just that but only to US number format. I also found the source but I don't have weeks to spend on a hobby project modifying someone else's code to fix a bug in the OS. So I caved and shared my data begrudgingly.
I accidentally shared my wife's data because I set her phone up while I was tired and picked the wrong option at setup (default is ticked to share data). Once done it was too late.
So yeah, please follow your own advice and stop spreading falsehood.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Google Is Your Friend
citation needed :p
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Although I prefer Maemo since it seems to be the least soul sucking OS around, Android is also quite nice once you install a few odds and ends to clean up the advertising mess - though you need hardware that can be rooted. Applications like DroidGuard, AdAway, LBE Privacy Guard, or similar will put a halt to anything trying call home or get in your way.
Last I checked, Cyanogenmod was made by Cyanogen and his crew. Cyanogen is employed by Samsung. All of them are well known in multiple places. They are most certainly not "anonymous hackers", you tool.
.... because running a software made by "anonymous hackers" is much more safe than original OEM version.
Except a) the hackers aren't anonymous; the guy is well known and has just taken up a job with a phone manufacturer. b) The people who write for the big companies actually are anonymous and often don't even work directly for the big companies c) most of the privacy violations we see are motivated by commercial interests which is before we even get to d) the thing about Cygenomod is that the source code is out there
c) that I mentioned above is the most important thing though. According to reviews, Windows Phone has no native contacts data store. This essentially means that you end up using Facebook (or linkedin etc) for storing data. This is a simple commercial decision which compromises the user's security in order to push forward Microsoft's partnership with Facebook and against Google+. It's very key to understand, at this point, that Microsoft's investment in Skype and Facebook tells us that the company's entire attitude to personal computing and privacy has changed. They will now do whatever they can to make up for the lost years when they allowed their own users to do more or less as they pleased.
Simply put, to have any chance of privacy at all we need something which has at most limited influence from commercial develpers and must have no influence from Microsoft.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();