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Another nasty pattern is with Google Translate.

You want text translations from 1 lang to next? Cool. It works.

You want an image text-> translated text? You MUST install and have Google app installed. No real reason other than to re-enable more spyware and garbage.



> No real reason other than to re-enable more spyware and garbage.

Why would the Google app have more spyware than the Translate app?

That doesn't make any sense. If Google wants to spy on you they'll put it in all their apps...

Regardless of what you think of Google, the reason a feature lives in one app and not another is not to increase spying...

The same functionality spread across two apps doesn't spy more than one.


Google is a large corporation. Anyone who's worked at a company that large can assert that the left hand and right hand don't always talk, and in fact may be antagonistic.


> Why would the Google app have more spyware than the Translate app?

It's a different app on top of the first app? I don't understand the question.

> Regardless of what you think of Google, the reason a feature lives in one app and not another is not to increase spying...

That's why google has apps at all.... They're a spyware company. That—and depriving users of honest transactions—is much of their business model. Especially post transition to Alphabet.


>> Why would the Google app have more spyware than the Translate app?

> It's a different app on top of the first app? I don't understand the question.

It's irrelevant if it's a different app or a different tab in the same app as far as "spyware" would be concerned.

2 apps by the same company doesn't increase data collection compared to 1 app, if they're installed on the same phone. It's not like Google gets twice as much location data... the number of apps is entirely irrelevant.


> It's irrelevant if it's a different app or a different tab in the same app as far as "spyware" would be concerned.

It's only irrelevant in the technical sense of "could we collect this data if we had another app". It's not irrelevant in terms of hedging against uninstalling.


Has this perhaps changed recently? Tried navigating to translate.google.com on both Android and iOS and the image translation features appear without issue.


I think GP was talking about the Translate _app_ needing the Google _app_. Translation can be done without a network connection.


This truly sounds like a technical limitation and not some scheme to get more spyware onto the phone. Like in theory the Translate app could do it without the Google app, but that would've taken extra changes that they didn't consider worthwhile.


I always wondered whether there was a purpose for that. It probably is just spyware.

Also the Google app is required for many other apps, like to use Google Podcasts.


This is probably just them shipping the internal org. The Google app must have some functionality that all the others need.


Presumably the user tracking component is common code.




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