

CyanogenMod Android privacy vs. developer wars - wagtail
http://www.zdnet.com/cyanogenmod-android-privacy-vs-developer-wars-7000013483/

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cmars
"Personally, I regard it as rather sad that simply collecting such basic
anonymous data about a smartphone or tablet could cause such an overreaction.
Simply using the Internet, without extra effort to erase your digital
footsteps, reveals far more about you than the information CM was going to
collect."

Some users choose the extra effort to minimize their digital footprint. What I
find sad is the trend in software and hardware products making that choice
impossible to make.

I think Cyanogenmod deserves praise for listening to their users and
addressing their concerns, even if they did not agree with them.

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acgourley
Can't he just collect stats on opt outs vs opt ins? It's a minor concession
from the privacy people and it should allow him to do basic analysis.

~~~
anywhichway
If I download offline software and opt out of any sort of online registration
or reporting I would hope it wouldn't even report my opt out. I don't want it
to go any calling home.

The key that people are missing is CM is trying to get this info to make the
best directional decisions possible and those that opt out are left out of
that conversation, but they probably are aware and okay with that. I say leave
them out.

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richardwhiuk
The key to these sorts of issues seems to be that people hate change to
privacy issues.

If these had been baked in at the start most people wouldn't have cared or
noticed, but because they are being changed (to something which is still
essentially anonymous, so doesn't affect 'digital footsteps' or whatever other
silly metaphor people want to use) there's an opportunity for people to make
themselves heard.

At the end of the day, this makes it harder for established software products
to compete against newly introduced things where this is baked in from day one
as part of a generic analytics thrust.

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ibrahima
I don't think they originally changed what data they collect, they only
changed whether you could opt out. After the small hubbub I think some people
claimed that you could brute force an IMEI from the hash so they decided to
use a more anonymous ID which I think gets regenerated on device wipe so it's
actually less useful for tracking total installs... I think the whole thing is
a brouhaha over nothing, the information is in no way trackable to an
individual user and it gives them the clout to go to manufacturers and say
"look, X people are using CyanogenMod, you should consider what we have to
say." By using Google services you leak way more information so caring about
this is just a little bit silly.

~~~
Zikes
Saying that other companies collect more information doesn't make it right in
this situation, as the people most opposed to anonymized data collection
likely do not use those services or have them set up in such a way as to
obscure as much of their personal information as possible.

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ISL
Debian's popcon is an elegant solution to this problem.

~~~
derleth
Yes, and that's because it's opt-in, the way respectful software is.

Malware is opt-out for a reason. Don't be malware.

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suyash
CM is totally awesome..every Android developer should use CM personally.

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derleth
Besides, if it wasn't violating privacy, the numbers are worthless because
they have no way of knowing that each number represents a user; someone could
be spamming them with false numbers and, without being able to weed the random
ones from the real ones, they'd have no way of knowing.

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derleth
Really, all this needs to be opt-in only. That's the only way to proceed
that's respectful of users and not redolent of the stench of malware.

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setheron
It's funny how people will throw fits over this yet be be contempt to know
that other sites (i.e. Facebook ) and browsers collect tremendous amounts of
information on them anyways. Hypocritical ?

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Zikes
I rather doubt that the particular people that threw fits about this issue are
allowing sites such as Facebook to collect "tremendous amounts of information"
about them.

~~~
npsimons
Exactly. It's a totally baseless assumption to make that advocates for privacy
are using Facebook or similar.

