Yeah right, I totally trust Google to do the right thing. Location Services OFF but they can and do still track you. That's been known for years. If they make truly Open Source phones that's one thing but if it's not open source, Apple, Google, MS etc will collect and sell the data.
Totally agree. The corporation has an awful lot more power here than the nation state not least because if they don’t like your laws they just move their headquarters out of the country.
In “Good Omens” (a brilliant pastiche of The Omen, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman) the tech savvy demon Crowley sends an inscrutable End User License Agreement of the kind the tech giants cook up for software, down to the Faustian Contracts department, with a post-it note saying “Read this, guys!” And that sums it up.
I am FAR more worried about the multinational tech giants abusing the system than I am worried about the state doing it.
If the state gets caught, it will probably get a whupping at the next election. If it suspends elections then tech abuse is a smaller problem than the termination of its accountability to WE THE PEOPLE.
If Google or Apple or Amazon or Microsoft or Oracle (or all five of them) conspired to abuse the tech, there is not one darned thing anyone anywhere can do about it. Because between them, they have control over more data than everybody else, anywhere, in the history of the human race... Combined.
China is catching up so add China to the list and you have six orgs literally so far above the law that even if the G8 collectively tried to nail them they’d probably end up on the losing side.