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Google Remotely Changed the Settings on a Bunch of Phones Running Android 9 Pie (theverge.com)
Last week, a mix of people who own Google Pixel phones and other devices running Android 9 Pie noticed that the software's Battery Saver feature had been switched on -- seemingly all by itself. And oddly, this was happening when the phones were near a full charge, not when the battery was low. From a report: Initially it was assumed that this was some kind of minor bug in the latest version of Android, which was only released a few weeks ago. Some users thought they might've just enabled Battery Saver without realizing. But it was actually Google at fault. The company posted a message on Reddit last night acknowledging "an internal experiment to test battery saving features that was mistakenly rolled out to more users than intended." So Google had remotely -- and accidentally -- changed a phone setting for a bunch of real-world customers. Several staffers at The Verge experienced the issue. "We have now rolled battery saver settings back to default. Please configure to your liking," the Pixel team wrote on Reddit before apologizing for the error.
are belong to us.
In other news, Android users are mysteriously finding their Location Services and Google history settings turned to the 'on' position, even if they had previously manually turned them off. /s
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
If I have the keys to the entire apartment complex! No seriously, there was a light on in your bedroom. I HAD to come in and turn that off.
If they can do that, it doesn't seem too far fetched that they could also turn on the phone's cameras and microphones at will.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
Google writes the OS for the phones that drives all the hardware. I think this one is blown out of proportion. Yes, I would rather not have them change settings like this, it was a mistake, they admitted and that is more important. Apple, Samsung and Microsoft have same capability on their front, even Tesla can do the same for their cars.
If you really want to stop this, install one of many open source initiative in the Android world and take control of your device, maybe pursue your elected official to regulate such updates. In the mean time, they have the capability to do whatever they want remotely, welcome to 2018.