The harder they push a feature, the more valuable the data they're stealing from you.
Google as an example. They push their "sensor fusion" location service EXTREMELY hard on Android. It will ask you to turn it on every time an app requests location and GPS hasn't locked. It's hard to not turn it on by accident. And once you hit yes, you never see another notification.
Well it turns out this "location service" provides some of the most valuable data Google ever receives. It's tied to their maps live traffic, "how busy is this place" features, location based advertising, wifi based mapping, accuracy of their IP->location maps.
It's creepy data core to their business and if too many people turned it off, it would seriously degrade their mass data collection.
Oh, and it's often given to law enforcement for dubiously legal "area" warrants where they simply say "give me all devices in this radius at this time". Where the radius can be hundreds of meters and the time can be hours.
Have things changed? Last time I checked, on stock Android you couldn't use the GPS without uploading your location to Google, and the whole shebang was wrapped up under the name "location services".
More than anything else, this particular piece of strong-arming makes me completely distrust stock Android handsets. It's shocking to me how casually the boundary of location privacy was violated, and it doesn't inspire confidence in any of the other privacy boundaries.
Google as an example. They push their "sensor fusion" location service EXTREMELY hard on Android. It will ask you to turn it on every time an app requests location and GPS hasn't locked. It's hard to not turn it on by accident. And once you hit yes, you never see another notification.
Well it turns out this "location service" provides some of the most valuable data Google ever receives. It's tied to their maps live traffic, "how busy is this place" features, location based advertising, wifi based mapping, accuracy of their IP->location maps.
It's creepy data core to their business and if too many people turned it off, it would seriously degrade their mass data collection.
Oh, and it's often given to law enforcement for dubiously legal "area" warrants where they simply say "give me all devices in this radius at this time". Where the radius can be hundreds of meters and the time can be hours.