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this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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What about Meta and Google?
it doesn't count when it's an american company doing it
Them too, but lukewarm by comparison.
Erm, WhatsApp would suggest otherwise.
WhatsApp was the vector for zero click access to a target's phone from Israel's weapons grade hacking Pegasus toolkit. They would send a video call, typically in the middle of the night, and with no input from the used they'd get full access. My personal belief is that they used functionality WhatsApp itself uses to access user data.
There was also an encrypted phone called ANOM, which had this trick calculator app with a hidden encrypted messager. "Made for criminals, by criminals". Except, when the guy started his business he got investment from the FBI and Australian Federal Police to pay for the servers and some of the phones themselves. Basically every time it sent an encrypted message it sent a separate encrypted message to the ANOM servers. It's entirely possible (perhaps even likely) that WhatsApp would do this also.
As for Google, they're truly insidious. Lots of banks now require you to connect to Google captcha servers - they don't give you the pictures, it's just the back end, basically the tracking parts. Then there's the controversy about them collecting location data when users have said no. They absolutely do collect data they shouldn't.
I'll accept that maybe I'm giving Google a pass because of misplaced nostalgia, and while I personally have never used or liked ~~Meta~~ Facebook, I'll concede that for a while it provided a service some people valued.
It's still my opinion that Google and Facebook have a large percentage of engineers that personally try to make them a genuinely good service, at least moreso than compared to TikTok and Temu. But I'm willing to concede it's not as much a practical difference as I would like.
Most of those people were sacked long ago. Today's menu for those that remained is shareholder maximum value extraction sausage fest
Why do you say that?
Cause they are owned by American billionaires and as such are more ethical. /s
Like Tim Apple, iPodJockey?
I was given this nickname by an old guy at work that knew I was good with computers. Never actually owned an ipod lol.
Emphasis on by comparison, as in "molten hot metal is cooler than the surface of the sun, by comparison".
TikTok and Temu actively have code in them that would be considered a virus in other contexts. They exploit your system to gain more access than they should, violating the point of sandboxed access.
By comparison Meta and Google merely take advantage of user ignorance and apathy by making opting out frustrating - but still technically doable.
Both practices are terrible, but that's not the same as saying they're equally bad.
This is simply just not true. Meta used an adversary-in-the-middle attack to decrypt Snapchat and other competitors traffic. Facebook, Apple, Twitter and Google have been intercepting traffic since before https/sandbox/anti-virus were the norm. Do you think they didn't do anything malicious?
Install any Google app on Windows and it will install a task schedule and a always online background service to "check for updates" and downloads and runs their executable without any user consent. I wonder why no body had a problem with that. hmm…
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2024/03/facebook-spied-on-snapchat-users-to-get-analytics-about-the-competition
Google runs it own operating system so they could technically do anything they so fucking please. You think Chinese Android variants are using exploits or just scooping data wholesale, because it can. But you think Google and Apple aren't?
It's showing your prejudice, bias and concern trolling more than anything.