The same people who thought it was a good idea to give control of the lockscreen to third parties who are notorious for attention-seeking and brinksmanship (album art) -- and then to remove the setting to control it.

(Album art is communicated through notifications so you can still revoke access on a per-app basis, but the new setting is not explicit, not global, coarse, and overrode my preferences during an "upgrade". Ugh.)

> Change location settings remotely

You don't have to change a setting if it never works.

points at temple

https://bgr.com/2018/08/20/lawsuit-google-violates-privacy-t...

It can have legitimate use cases, for example administrating a large fleet of Android phones in a corporation. But I have to agree that mobilizing such machinery against typical non-enterprise users is stupid. In some countries that could make them vulnerable to huge lawsuits

LMAO. They already track people who disabled tracking without telling them about it.

If you request they delete your data they probably won't, either.

Tech companies (especially Google) are giant black boxes with vast control over our lives. "The Circle" wasn't a good movie in my eyes, but it might give people a feeling of what such a company is capable of.

I guess it's pretty obvious that the company who regularly pushes new software to your phone can also change the interpretation of settings and preferences as they like, or remove the preferences and settings altogether, or replace your wallpaper with cat photos. How has this gone uncontemplated by the HN commentariat?