I had two apps that radically changed their business model (owner?) through updates with no recourse.
I had an app called gas cubby, which let me locally - on the phone - keep track of all my vehicles. I could enter detailed information about each car such as year, make, model, vin, insurance policy, gas purchases, oil changes and the like. It would tell you gas mileage and remind you of upcoming maintenance. One day, I updated the app and all my local data was uploaded to the cloud.
Another app I updated was camscanner from tencent that basically did the same thing. Think of all the PDFs you scan going to their cloud.
To what did you switch? Camscanner is otherwise an excellent app, especially for combining multiple images and straightening them out.
Source: I am a user
and secondly, they or an analytics package can just read everything client side and upload it to a server anyway
doesn't matter if its whatsapp, or signal, or some protonmail client if such a thing exists
I just don't use them with that assurance in mind, I use them for other things.
If it's a large company like Facebook that values these products like Whatsapp at billions I trust them at least on this issue. I'm pretty sure they're not going to put junk third party malware for 50k into the Whatsapp client.
This is mostly an issue for apps done by individual developers who have huge incentive to take these deals, like the barcode scanner in question.
I use the apps for other things, not for any assurance of privacy.
You literally mentioned a company that betrayed trust so bad a government tried to call them to account.
When they stand to make billions from breaking my trust I'm sceptical. When they stand to make a penny and ruin their entire product, then no I' not.
The problem in question here, that rogue developers sell out their product to third parties, is not an issue that Facebook, Google etc have. They have every incentive to keep their software secure.
this is.... I’m speechless, I ran out of words for this absurdity
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
You may not be able to trust facebook with your privacy, but you can trust them not to install a malware that swipes your bitcoins.
That being said, I despise the current state of affairs with cellphones. I don't like needing to trust any corp. I'm jumping to a Linux native phone when my current device dies.
Sure, they might not take malware that swipes my crypto, but I wouldn't put it past them to take malware that uses my resources to mine for crypto. What is the downside for them?
This happened to me with Chrome. It auto-updated, then automatically synced browser history, passwords, and who knows what else, to Google. They soon changed it to opt-in sync, but it was too late for me at that point; they had already hoovered up my personal data. That was when I stopped using Chrome and switched fully to Firefox.
A while back, I was approached by a [NATION OBFUSCATED] developer, asking to buy up one of my older apps (they are all open-source).
I ignored the request, and reported the approach to Apple, as I'm sure that this actor has been doing the same for many other apps.
This is apparently a common method for malware-slingers. They buy established, older apps, that they assume the developer has abandoned (I hadn't abandoned it, but it's a simple app that hardly ever needs tweaking. If I stop supporting an app, I remove it from the store).
They then "update" the app, with a little "extra flavoring."
Neither of the 2 scenarios you describe are even remotely what's happened here. Not sure how you got from 'malicious ad popups' to 'app added cloud feature'.
Google does allow no-root firewalls on the PlayStore which rely on VPN APIs. Here are some open source ones: https://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/jhtvn4/a_list_...