I have a good experience with Huawei Band. Huawei doesn't even require to pair the watch with an official app! So I never connected it to the Internet or installed their app, paired directly with gadgetbridge from the first day.
Amazfit required a one time registration to get a one time code to unlock things, but I used a throwaway email id, and then deleted their app immediately. After that point the watch only syncs with gadgetbridge. The best part is that the watch has no internet capabilities, and gadgetbridge itself doesn't have internet permissions either so you know that absolutely no data can leave your device
> To request a user's age range and sharing status, you call the Play Age Signals API (beta) from your app at runtime. The default age ranges the API returns are 0-12, 13-15, 16-17, and 18+, but you can receive custom age ranges.
But I don't find it any better. I don't see any viable reason to provide identification to my phone's OS. If a parent buys a phone for their child, they can already set up parental controls before handing it over.
I wish Motorola all the best with their GrapheneOS partnership.
I'm going to stop visiting the restaurant that makes the best food to spite them because I don't like their delivery policies, even though I'm going to eat inside.
The rumored Motorola devices are even more expensive. It's the signature and some foldables, all in the 1000+ MSRP range. At least with pixels you can get the a series for as little as 400 on sale.
If you buy one of the Motorola Grapheneos phones, you're gonna be marked. You will stand out in the crowd. It has happened before and will happen more frequently as the world becomes more authoritarian.
Oh but “the government already knows everything” as all the other privacy doomers like to say. “They” can probably already predict what phone you’re going to buy and what you’re going to eat for lunch, right? So why worry about this?
On the other hand, privacy becomes a luxury. People love signaling their status and standing out from the crowd. Entire car and clothing brands exist solely because of that.
And if enough people stand out, it doesn't matter anymore.
Apparently, looking at Iraq and Vietnam, US citizens only believe in "personal freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the value of human life" when it comes to US citizens, not to humans in general.
Even on HN, I saw a lot, that when people discuss surveillance topics, they argue whether ie NSA can spy on Americans, not on everyone. Mostly, nobody even question the human rights of those inferior humans abroad.
Vietnam and Iraq were both unpopular wars in their own ways, so they don't seem like good examples if you're trying to find examples of what US citizens support.
Also, a country surveilling its own citizens has unique and different implications compared to surveilling other countries. Citizens need to be able to influence their own government, but mass control can nullify citizen power entirely which becomes its own problem.
Then, on a US website, you link to another US website which keeps track of various war crimes. Try finding an equivalent website for China in China, or for Iran in Iran. This is part of the asymmetric freedom issue on the internet that many people ignore. There are a lot of lies and propaganda spread within other countries that censor and deny some types of information from even existing, then they use that as a springboard to spread it around the world.
In the US, we can criticize ourselves which is important, since it helps us improve.
Well, adware and spyware just became a normal thing that people surrendered to and don't call a malware anymore due to heavy lobbying.
Google adds cloud AI spyware to the new android versions, feeds private email contents to it; meta tries to spy by any fingerprinting techniques it can find and sells data to thousands of "data brokers" and everything is framed like it's supposed to be this way.
Would be much better if each "data broker" executive, Palantir's/Meta managers, Celebrite/NSO mercenaries do jail time just like malware/botnet/data exfiltration actors from those times.
Such a convenient time frame with all think-of-the-children bs wave to point fingers at the one of the best VPN services our there with spotless reputation and raise a hysteria with duplicated stream of posts, isn't it?
Sad that I had to scroll down so far to see someone pointing this out. This is the least organic comment section I've ever seen on HN. Also very convenient that the manner of moderation has kept this on the front page for most of 3 days, quite unheard of.
World is not black and white. Most people would probably prefer to live in a world with low-power petty-crime rings and ability to be free and safe apart from having their wallet stolen once in a while rather than with e.g. Russian-like state mafia country with enormous amount of power and ability to target everyone at every time for their families interests. When you have a destroyed social ladder and everything can be taken at any moment under few people control immediately because they just want it.
That's apart from the fact that in the palantir case you also invite foreign intelligence and CIA to your home.
The first law about building technical and legal infrastructure to enable website blocking in Russia in 2012 was passed under the name of children protection. Everything else is an addition.
People from duma (the russian parlament) also publicly stated it would never use it for anything but children protection.
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