This proves Google doesn't have control over the big picture.
They got badly surprised by their own security warning.
They are lying about the situation while knowing we know they are lying.
No message control / (social) media control. Does Google even have a public relations teams? A press officer? Is anyone managing all of this? Hello? Is somebody home?
6 + 2 months without progress from a company with infinite money -what is going on at Google? Fits right in with what happened to Terraria.
Also this is not the first time Google acting dirty - Youtube working crazy slow in Firefox, 15-20 attempts needed to solve stupid reCAPTCHA in non-Chrome browser only.
Google is acting dirty with YouTube in other browsers as well. I am 100% convinced they are sniffing the user agent and degrade the experience for certain browsers on purpose.
For example, in iOS Safari the desktop version of youtube.com has a completely broken picture-in-picture feature on the video element.
But if you open exactly the same page in iOS Brave (just a skin over the same engine because Apple doesn't allow competing browser engines) you suddenly get working picture-in-picture playback.
The funny thing is: A website doesn't have to do anything special to support PIP (introduced in iOS 14). Every video element automatically received that button. Google had to go out of their way to break this feature in Safari. (I assume they don't want to allow it because it competes with YouTube Premium, which specifically advertises "background play" as one of the paid features).
They purposefully broke picture in picture, there's no question about it. If you use the Shortcuts app to run some JavaScript in Safari that blocks propagation of the `webkitpresentationmodechanged` event, PiP will start working properly again.
Sadly it is from three years ago and does not address all the other anti-competitive behavior. Still, a step in the right direction I guess (but I doubt that anything will happen for the other violations).
Maybe I am naive, but I would expect some chain of responsibility from the CEO down to the lowest intern. And "all our apps just stopped working world wide" or "we haven't released an app update for 2 months for most of our apps that are used by... probably billions of people worldwide" should be events that would receive scrutiny from upper level management?
I saw one in a Best Buy. I tried to check it out, but it needed to be reflashed (I don't remember what was wrong with it, it was months ago). I was there to buy a phone, and they might have made a sale, but someone dropped the ball.
For me it's the price. I feel okay spending 2.5k on a gaming PC or a mountain bike. But a smartphone for over $500 is just excessive for my usage. As long as the camera is good enough, I don't really care.
I would really like to own a foldable phone, but not at the current prices.
> "every day kind of ban-worthy confirmed ToS violation on the YouTube account"
But that's the nefarious and the hidden bit, and the biggest complaint is that there is no "motive", because people aren't involved at any stage. Every day bots and algorithms tend to YouTube's ToS violations and don't give enough feedback that explains to a human why they did what they don't, don't seem to be reviewed by a human anywhere in the process, and there seems to exist no real human oversight for appeals or post-mortem reviews. It's all very opaque to people, so yes it is hidden and seems nefarious. It especially seems nefarious that there is no real "motive" just machines eating each other endlessly with seemingly no human oversight. (And then that the YouTube account takedown also takes down most of the communications tools such as GMail along with it only furthers the nefarious and "post-mortem" feelings of such an "every day kind of ban".)
The grand-grand-whatever-parent post to this entire discussion thread is "I don't believe no one has noticed at Google yet. There has to be something else at this point." That's what I'm agreeing is going on. It's not just some normal automated process that a human hasn't looked at. I think you're confusing "ban-worthy confirmed ToS violation examined by and confirmed by people" (what we're speculating) with "automated ban no one has even looked at".
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough in some of my belief: even if people have noticed now, people can't see clearly enough into the machines. You can't scry "motive" from algorithms, no matter how hard you have tried. You've got opaque numbers and scores and rules around them, and somehow you expect a person to come up with an opinion about how the machine arrived at those actions?
We know from centuries of human behavior that rules systems and governments syncretize until the average person just trusts them, assumes their outputs are "fair" when they can't see well enough inside the black box. I am under the impression that such a thing has happened at Google. Too much belief in the "impartiality of algorithms" (which has never been true) blinds a group to avoid questioning what the machines have already done because the machines wouldn't have done it if they didn't have a "good reason". Of course we all know that it is unlikely any of those machines actually reason at all ("have motive"), and instead reflect the biases of their programming, the lack of general oversight in their outliers and false positives/false negatives, the questions of ethics that would be asked of a human judge (and jury), etc.
I assume, because Google has given me no evidence to assume otherwise, if people examined and confirmed the result, they did so with a rubber stamp and presumption the machine is right unless proven otherwise. That's the nefarious thing: there's no motive here. The people aren't given motive to question the machine's decisions, because the machine's decisions are "fair", and the machines have no motive of their own to suggest the sorts of "fair" that include ethics and judicial process, just a bunch of dice rolled that landed with enough snake eyes to "convict". (It's a classic sci-fi dystopian tale, that Google has made an unfortunate part of so many lives.)
Google isn't a company run by some AI algorithm though, at least not yet. At the end of the day it's run by people. When something gets this much public notice (or even much less than it), people step in to take control and make the decisions. If this high-profile PR-damaging ban was confirmed up to fairly high levels of the company (which it must have been by now), then there's a clear reason for it that's a lot stronger than "Well this black box algorithm doesn't like him and we don't know why".
To return to the original post that started this conversation subthread:
> I don't believe no one has noticed at Google yet. There has to be something else at this point.
I think that's true, it's just that those of us on the outside will never find out the real reason because the decisionmakers within Google are deciding to stay silent about this for whatever reason.
I'm saying that in a company like Google in the mindstate of Silicon Valley, they've invested millions into the system and they start from an ideal image that the system is unbiased and "fair" and good.
Even if it goes to the highest levels in the company, they aren't playing the game "prove why the system was wrong", they are are playing the game "prove why the millions of dollars we poured into this system were right". Especially if they are at fairly high levels of the company removed from the day to day maintenance of the system, they have more personally invested in assuming the system works right, in believing the system to be an unbiased and "fair" black box (because their personal reputations get tied to the company's reputations get tied to the system's reputation).
I think the "something else" is just general mistrust in broken "guilty until proven innocent" systems. I believe people have noticed, but the system still wins because the system is usually "right". It's the "benign" AI bureaucracy "utopia" Google (and a lot of Silicon Valley) keeps saying they all want and keeps trying to build doing exactly what it was built to do, absolve humans of human decisions and blame it on the "fair" black box. But maybe I'm just a huge cynic about human nature.
That may be true of other lower-profile situations, but this particular ban is behaving as intended. They're just not saying anything publicly about why the ban was enacted.
Suddenly losing access to your main mail account alone is a pretty big deal already and can have significant impact on someones life. Now add to that the loss of access to services like google drive, purchased apps etc.. The Terraria youtube channel was locked too through this if I understand correctly.
That his immense frustration stretches beyond the plan to release his game on Stadia is relatable in my opinion.
This new "bitter" meme that started some time last year is the latest way that people use to discredit dissenters even more.
There is anger, righteous anger, biblical fury, disappointment, inner emigration, reacting strongly while actually being amused, reacting strongly while not caring and about 50 more shades of underlying feelings.
"bitter" is appropriate for the feeling when a spouse cheats after 20 years of marriage and it actually affects you.
"bitter" as currently used on the internet is just propaganda that tries to inflict maximum damage on dissenters. It often comes from corporate-adjacent developers.
> "bitter" as currently used on the internet is just propaganda that tries to inflict maximum damage on dissenters. It often comes from corporate-adjacent developers.
oh interesting. that was certainly not my intent! I agree though, i would be bitter as well and certainly stand behind him over the globocorpos in practically all of these related situations.
The developer got his Google accounts suspended for no clear reason (probably stupid ML models to do moderation), and couldn't get anyone from Google to help, so he cancelled the release of Terraria for Stadia. Which seemed fair enough.
The very likely explanation is google is trying to do a cleanup - either removing the data from the mentioned apps from ads systems, or building transparency tools to give you more control.
I think this is a case of Google's security team saying "we should automatically warn apps that are two months out of date that they need to update," incorrectly assuming that their own apps would always update at least once every 60 days.
Can you imagine being an iOS developer working on Gmail right now, having shipped literally nothing this year? I'd be requesting an internal transfer (and/or polishing my resume).
I think there are two concerns here. The article starts off about the "outdated" warning, then goes on a tangent about Google not releasing iOS apps anymore because of privacy labels. tehlike is talking about why they think updates stopped; with Apple's improved privacy requirements, Google has to do some work to get their apps up to that standard.
For the thing that the article is about; i.e. the out of date warning, isn't that what Google is doing to all apps that embed a Google login now?
> Can you imagine being an iOS developer working on Gmail right now, having shipped literally nothing this year?
I'm sure they're shipping internal releases to 100,000 of their coworkers, so are probably getting feedback on new features while waiting for releases to the public to become unblocked. In the meantime, they're probably collecting more than $300,000 a year in total comp, so probably not super incentivized to quit. Google is kind of like other big companies now, I imagine -- don't rock the boat too much, do what your manager says -- with the upside that if you play your cards right you can accumulate a large chunk of savings that earns meaningful recurring income and a million dollar house you own outright before you're 40. Not for everyone, but I imagine the iOS Gmail team is not super incentivized to start burning down the corporate headquarters because they're restless about the release cycle.
Thing is, these labels were known publically for at least a month before they were enforced. Google also managed to get out four updates of gmail 2-3 months ago, according to the history listing on the app store. This feature didn't make the cut for any of those releases?
After seeing that, one can not help but to assume that 1.) the lack of updates are related to the privacy label deadline and 2.) that most of its apps are in need of bug fixes and aren’t receiving those updates.
Whilst interesting, that graph does need each app split out a bit more clearly-while it’s clear that none of them have updated since the cutoff, it would be best to be able to see each apps release cadence beforehand.
I agree. It is clear that Google has paused app releases due to this but this graphic obscures how abnormal this is for any individual app. There are 13 apps in that graph and it appears that there are usually a handful a week. So on average they are only updating monthly anyways.
So a 2 month break is just skipping a release (or two) for most apps which isn't a huge break in bugfixes.
Previous to this the Google apps got frequent updates. It’s documented out there. Nothing since Dec 8 is probably as notable for devs working on features (but not this effort) as it is to us wondering when the apps are going to be updated.
"Frequent updates" would still only be 1-2 releases by now for each app. The graph of updates stopping above overlays all the different apps which have offset releases
> Can you imagine being an iOS developer working on Gmail right now, having shipped literally nothing this year?
This is a bit funny because from the user's perspective it's fantastic! To put it mildly, we are not great fans of Gmail upgrades, especially big ones.
> Can you imagine being an iOS developer working on Gmail right now, having shipped literally nothing this year?
Having worked at Google, it's very common that your work takes more than 6 weeks to reach users even when you're on the full release cadence (which is maybe a release monthly for most apps, and sometimes a cherrypick bugfix release in addition). Projects taking more than 6 months from engineering complete to being live wasn't even that exceptional.
If you're referring to possible justifications for the delay on app update releases, I really like (and want to believe) this angle and will update the article to include the thought. If it is indeed the case - then it shows that Apple's privacy labels are having a powerful pro-consumer effect on major app developers
I would prefer if you don't quote me for obvious reasons - i am speculating. I have left google about 1 year ago, so don't have any magical knowledge besides general workings.
I really think google is trying to be more good than bad in these matters, knowing how the sausage is made. but again, that's my probably biased view.
Interesting thing is that the data they collect on iOS is probably not less on Android, because they are more likely to remove collection to hide bad practices.
This makes the iOS privacy labels the minimum data they collect on Android.
I couldn't write a better press release! Really, "we are building the transparency tools needed to give you more control"?
It's been 8 months, 2 since their homework was due. The choices are (1) they are incapable and incompetent or (2) this is a fake manufactured crisis. There isn't even any particular app change required - you literally just fill out a sheet and add another prompt.
The very likely explanation is google is trying to do a cleanup - either removing the data from the mentioned apps from ads systems, or building transparency tools to give them even more control, over your phone.
My unpopular opinion is that these specific Google apps are advertising supported, and Apple are cutting them off from advertising revenue with the unavailability of IDFA on iOS14.5.
What is the motivation for Google to maintain these apps on iOS if these expensive apps no longer earn revenue for the company?
It will harm Apple iPhone sales if these apps are no longer available on iOS as they are some of the most popular in the world, so I'd say there is either wheeling and dealing behind the scenes to cut a deal where Apple pay Google to maintain these apps, or Apple are in panic mode trying to bring their own apps up to the level of the Google ones. Google Maps and Apple Maps may be near equivalents in the USA, but in the rest of the world Apple Maps is far behind.
This is about the requirement to disclose how much data you are collecting and what you are doing with it that rolled out as "Privacy Nutrition Labels" in iOS 14.3 a couple of months ago.
>Apple announced Privacy Nutrition Labels at WWDC 2020. Under the scheme, developers selling apps on the App Store must explain the privacy practices of each one they sell. That means detailed information concerning what data they collect, why, and what they do with it must be provided to users in the form of what looks like a food nutrition label.
Apple has asked developers to provide this information with their app since Dec. 8; while apps already available in the store don’t have to have it, as developers roll out updates, they’ll be expected to include where data is being used and in what category (including financial and personal data).
If you update your app, you must disclose the privacy information to users.
Google's solution to the problem has been to refuse to update their apps, and they have waited so long that they have triggered their own automated security warning.
Our apps (large well known company) had our legal team thoroughly go through our apps before allowing the privacy information be provided to Apple to ensure it was truthful. It delayed a release by a few days, otherwise no problems. It's not rocket science.
Maybe Google is taking the time to actually evaluate and correctly label what they use for advertising instead of taking FB's approach of checking every box.
I think the speculation elsewhere in the comments that Google would rather do major rewrites and end some of their current data collection practices than disclose what they have been doing all along is more likely to be correct.
But Google has their own privacy policy. So is this "nutrition label" requiring information that they didn't already have in their privacy policy? Or are they assuming that nobody reads the privacy policy but more people will read this label?
Apple isn’t just cutting them off from tracking at the app level. Go look at Safari. It is tracking who is tracking you on websites.
Without these, Google only gets revenue from search on iOS. That itself is diminished because they won’t be able to later show you ads based on your search. That is why Google pushes you to sign in.
An additional problem is that search revenue from iOS devices is greater than on Android (as of a few years ago). So this, and that consumers spend most of their time on mobile, is a huge problem for Google. This is a LOT of their revenue.
Like you said, this looks like a silent war. Google can’t complain about monopoly power given that they control Android. That’s why this war is silent.
Also, this isn’t just about Google. You have Facebook, Snap, etc...
Yes, I have said the same in another comment here but it has been downvoted out of existence by some “well meaning” folk! Google are losing out on the web property advertising and in app advertising. Not updating or supporting the major apps is likely just being used as leverage by Google.
Here in New Zealand, Apple Maps is more or less on par with Google Maps with a lot of variability in different areas. I switched from Apple to Google about a year ago and to be honest even if Google Maps is sometimes better than Apple, it's not always better. There are times I wish I had access to Apple Maps as they actually have better data (or in some cases they have data while Google has nothing at all to show) in certain areas. New roads for example take ages (sometimes in the order of years) to show up on Google whereas they're on Apple relatively quickly.
I wish I didn't have to use Google Maps, but in Switzerland Apple Maps is terrible. I try the switch again every now and then but I've never managed to go a week without having to hop over to Google because Apple is lacking, so I might as well just use Google 100% of the time. It's a real shame. It's not even just convenient features like opening hours and such, but the most basic searches for a business or something...
OsmAnd+ is much better than Google Maps on Android! The only missing feature is Satellite View, but all others are so much better. Frankly many people still not aware OSM apps and even web(www.openstreetmap.org) are so good today.
In Austria Apple maps are pretty much unusable. Unless you are in a big city and only want to use main roads you are better of just walking in the general direction and hoping for the best.
Also a New Zealander. One interesting thing that Apple Maps features is maps inside buildings. For example, I work inside of a Westfield mall and you can zoom into the mall and filter by floors. Each floor shows their respective retailers rather than it all being dumped in one flat 2D plane
That's interesting! I'm an American currently in Costa Rica. I use Apple Maps in the US and its quality is decent enough. Here in Costa Rica, Apple Maps is virtually unusable. It says it can't provide directions for something just down the street, <1 km away.
I guess Google maps might use the IDFA, but photos doesn't have ads and Gmail only works when you're signed in, so a theory that this is related to the IDFA doesn't really hold water.
I would like to correct you here. It doesn't matter if the app is using IDFA or not. If the app is using data for targeting and advertising purposes, they have to disclose that.
Users are always signed into Facebook but they still have to disclose for instance.
Facebook doesn‘t need the IDFA to rack advertising in their own app but they need it to:
- track advertising shown in other apps that use their advertising tools
- use their main app to tie the IDFA (which is all they have from third party apps) to your FB account
Privacy label requirements that some users may look at are one thing, but IDFA access specifically pops up a dialog that can be denied, like location access so it is way more endangered.
But if you're signed in with your google account, they don't need apple to allow them to access an anonymized advertiser id. They have everything they need to track you across iOS and Chrome. The IDFA is completely irrelevant to them here.
Somebody broke something. It's kinda funny for us and embarrassing for Google, but its not a conspiracy
You are applying a technical reason here, but see the bigger picture. Google is being cut off on making money on iOS generally - in web properties, in apps via admob, etc, etc, so may have made a decision that it is no longer supporting it and may be doing so just as leverage. Apple would see the danger that it would drive folks to alternatives that do support Google products.
Alternatively, Apples privacy stance means I’m sticking to an iPhone despite being unhappy about the closed nature of their eco system and Apple’s constant attempts to clamp down on the ability of 3rd parties to repair their devices.
Or maybe you could consider a company which has a good privacy stance and at the same time does not create walled garden and allows repairs: https://puri.sm/products. (happy user)
Nothing I've seen suggests they're able to implement aftermarket hardware checks on phones that are already on the market and don't have them. Difficulty of repair seems to go up a bit with every generation, too, as they cram more into every cubic millimeter. One more reason not to insist on the latest and greatest.
Or get a newer phone? Or not do that, for that matter. As long as there's no major security issues and you don't feel a pressing need for hardware or software improvements not available on older models, why upgrade at all?
Why I can use my 12-year-old laptop with latest Linux kernel while a phone is not updated after <5 years? Maybe for you it's a good balance between repairability and novelty, but for me it's planned obsolescence harming the nature.
> As long as there's no major security issues and you don't feel a pressing need for hardware or software improvements not available on older models, why upgrade at all?
There are always major security issues. Look at how often they appear in browsers.
Phone hardware's been growing up considerably faster than PC hardware over the last decade-plus, I think, but you're right that planned obsolescence exists and there's a tradeoff.
For me, these are professional tools, and reliability therefore outweighs just about everything else in my consideration of what to use. Tools that don't reliably help me complete the task at hand are the wrong tools, no matter what their other virtues, and nothing else I've tried has been more reliable in that sense than Apple hardware - granted, I haven't had as good a time with the Touch Bar-era laptops, but even they have still been head and shoulders over any past or present Windows laptop I've tried, and I'm not even going to talk about my experience with Linux on laptops because I have enough problems today without attracting a crowd of angry partisans. And from what I hear about the M1 laptops, Apple seem to have gotten their act together, in any case.
Outside work, I still need the appliances I use in daily life to be reliable. Apple's phones aren't up to the standard I prefer, but they come closer to that than anything else I've tried, so they're what I prefer in that regard too. I would like it if they seemed likely to ever again make a phone that's comfortably sized for my hands, but nobody else does either, so that's life, I guess. It's a lot of why I learned how to repair my SEs and where to get parts for them. When it's no longer tenable for whatever reason to keep using them, I'll figure out what to do next. Probably that will be a newer iPhone, because I don't think it's likely anyone else will come along to compete on the combination of compatibility, reliability, and active concern for privacy that matters most to me. I think it would be great if someone did, though.
In any case, as I think we've both said in this conversation, there are tradeoffs, and these are mine. I generally assume that other people who talk here about using an iPhone have made that decision after a process of consideration not wholly dissimilar to mine, and that anyone regularly on Hacker News probably has a good sense of alternatives given how they're regularly discussed here.
> For me, these are professional tools, and reliability therefore outweighs just about everything else in my consideration of what to use.
Can't argue here, Apple is indeed the only choice in such case.
> and I'm not even going to talk about my experience with Linux on laptops because I have enough problems today without attracting a crowd of angry partisans.
I bet you did not use laptops designed for Linux and instead installed it on some Lenovo. I've been having solid experience with a laptop sold with preinstalled Linux. But Apple is still probably more solid.
> I don't think it's likely anyone else will come along to compete on the combination of compatibility, reliability, and active concern for privacy that matters most to me. I think it would be great if someone did, though.
I'll admit I haven't tried a laptop designed for Linux compatibility. It's a tempting thought, actually. But, and I realize this may sound absurd to some, I also have some very specific form factor and physical durability requirements for a laptop, namely that it fit into and withstand the stresses of the laptop sleeve built into a Lowepro Flipside 500 camera backpack.
Wildlife photography matters to me enough that I'd switch careers if I thought I could make it pay, which is sadly next to impossible. None of the equipment that backpack is built for does me any good if I leave it at home, and some of the best wildlife shots I've ever gotten have been on breaks at work. So a laptop has to be able to ride along, and I've never found anything but a Mac that can do so and still have a good enough spec for the work I do.
On the other hand, I expect to be taking on full-remote jobs for the foreseeable future, between my own preferences and the effect of the pandemic on the industry. So maybe I can think about going back to a satchel for carrying work equipment on the likely infrequent occasions when I need to be onsite somewhere, and that would let me relax the "thin and sturdy" requirement that's partly kept me on Macs for a while now.
I'll freely admit, there's a lot not to like about the MacOS UI. It would be nice to have a daily driver running KDE again, and not have Emacs be a second-class citizen in the windowing system.
I was a die hard android user from its release until last year, my pixel 2 had simply become unusable due to battery life and performance issues that I'm 90% certain were related to ad tracking on android apps.
It's 2021, servers are a fraction of the pice and vastly easier to deploy than they were in '08 when Apple needed google for these apps.
I'm not convinced we use the G-suite of products for any particularly good reason other than they have a G and they are free. For the margins and scale of ios Apple could easily provide equivalent apps in-house if customers need them to be free or let the market set the price for non-ad supported versions.
Since switching I've only used gmail and maps/waze from g-suite. I'm 90% certain I can replace maps/waze in the near future.
A pixel 2 is a 4 year old phone... I wouldn't be surprised if your battery is performing at a fraction of its original capability, and that might be slowing down performance too. It's not like Apple is immune to this either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
It's anecdotal, but I've replaced the battery on my Pixel 2 and it works like new again. I've also replaced a friend's Pixel 2 battery and they held off on buying a new phone for another year or two.
Phone batteries generally lose 20% of capacity every ~500 cycles. So lumost may well have a battery with only 1/2 the original capacity or less. [1]
It's not just the cycles, it's also time. Li-Ion batteries deteriorate over time regardless of cycling. That's why you want to make sure the battery you buy hasn't been sitting on a shelf somewhere for 2 years.
You had the last 3 phones for ~4 years each as well? Android has only existed for ~10 years...
Look, it might very well be a shitty phone. Just saying that after 4 years I'd cut any phone a break. Especially since phones got impractically thin, batteries have really struggled to work the way they do when they are new after a year or two.
>It will harm Apple iPhone sales if these apps are no longer available on iOS
I don't think so, Google needs to be on iPhones much more than Apple needs Google to be on iPhones. Gmail works with Mail and I don't think many people are going to switch to Android just to use a native Gmail app.
> Apple are cutting them off from advertising revenue with the unavailability of IDFA on iOS14.5
Is it impossible to do any kind of advertising without the IDFA? Or is this simply a matter of them only being able to make a smaller yet still gigantic pile of money?
You still have lots of options for advertising. All that IDFA does is allow you to identify users across apps. E.g. you're using Google Maps and Google wants to use your behavior in the app to then show you ads in Safari later. Or vice versa use your browsing behavior from Safari to decide which ad to show you in the Google Maps app.
Also, it allows Google to track that you've seen an ad and later bought something from the advertiser's website, so the advertiser knows what they get in return for their ad spend.
Apple rules state that the app needs to show the prompt if it does tracking based on any id. As far I know you can't avoid it by using logged-in user id or email. Technically yes, but not without breaking the rules set by Apple.
"Sharing a list of emails, advertising IDs, or other IDs with a third-party advertising network that uses that information to retarget those users in other developers’ apps or to find similar users."
I think Google does this via keychain item sharing. This won't go away, but only works between apps of the same vendor (who could arguably just also ship a giant monolithic app instead).
The Google apps function like a security key. I pay Google too much every month for Youtube TV that I don't watch, and at this point isn't a bargain compared to restoring television service to the Comcast plan I need anyway for internet access.
When users access many types of paid subscription accounts, they are asked to confirm the login in a Google app on their mobile device. It's dangerous if vulnerabilities aren't being fixed and their servers still trust these apps to authenticate.
On another note, over the past year a few people have told me their new email addresses, then they continued using Gmail out of inertia. A significant enough problem with their aging apps could be the event that gets users to follow through and make a transition away from using Google services as a default.
Does anybody trust these privacy labels? What keeps companies from submitting some labels and be done with it? While still track everything for whatever purpose they like? Nobody can check what they are doing on their servers.
But you can check what your device is sending to their servers. Intentionally lying about data collection seems like an easy way to get kicked off the App Store entirely.
All traffic is encrypted these days. So you cannot check it.
Also the labels are not so much about what data is sent but about what the companies do with the data. Example: Do they just use your position once to show you relevant search results, or do they create a location history of you? Do they sell that history? Do they combine it with other data about you? There is no way to know.
> All traffic is encrypted these days. So you cannot check it.
Of course you can, just configure your phone to use a MITM proxy (e.g. burp). This won’t work for apps that use certificate pinning but most apps don’t.
Of course, you still don’t know what data they really store and/or sell.
When looking at my app's settings, it's using the honor system for these labels. Apple is giving companies a way to display privacy info on their app's page, but the labels aren't verified. Think of it the same as the app's description field.
it's not a big deal, it just highlights that Google has stalled over 2 months on pushing out updates for its flagship apps, because it seems they don't want to add iOS privacy "nutrition" labels. Like Facebook did (and suffered some[0] pushback[1] for). Edit: interesting that this is getting downvoted.
This seems the norm for tech companies and more restrictive privacy policies. GDPR was originally announced in 2012, in 2016 it was adopted by the EC. After that member states had two years to adopt it into law, after which enforcement would start.
Most companies didn't bother doing anything about it until 2018, and even today a lot of non-EU companies restrict or block access to EU customers, saying it's too hard to only use personal data for purposes they have been given permission for.
My guess is you're being downvoted because you claimed Google doesn't want to add iOS privacy "nutrition" labels with absolutely no evidence to back you up.
As HN's guidelines say, always assume the best intensions.
It's just as likely they just haven't shipped the new versions of the apps yet for many other technical reasons. Given the labels are a requirement and Google hasn't announced a lawsuit, there's no reason to believe they have any intention to not add them.
I see articles like this with a semi-conspiratorial angle and I just roll my eyes. They had a bug, and they fixed it. Not everything is part of some master plot.
A non conspiratorial interpretation is if an app uses a bunch of upstream libraries that change their behavior every time someone checks in a change you want these labels to be automatically updated because you don't want media articles for every mistake. All these need some new release process.
It sounds rather expensive to halt all releases for months, just to more efficiently update privacy labels. The scenario you describe would mostly likely go differently: they'd continue to update at least flagship apps while working on better automated dependency monitoring solutions.
The "big deal" is that Google hasn't updated any of its apps since Dec 8, due to ongoing privacy war with Apple over Google's iOS apps. Google refuses to admit, as Facebook has, to tracking everything you do in every possible way.
This is "just" the first big thing to break as a result.
> While Google stalls on pushing updates to its apps, it’s notable that its rivals like Apple Maps, are continuing to innovate with new features in their apps.
Ha, I actually followed that link, curious what new features Apple Maps has. The only update listed there is this:
> Apple Maps update to add Google Maps and Waze-like incident reporting
Also set up a non-Gmail email and redirect your account recovery across all services there, because if Google suddenly bans you from Gmail and it's your only recovery email for a service, you may get locked out of it permanently.
Why is this down voted? I've been locked out of my google account because of misbehaving AI and I seriously regret not downloading my photos and emails.
This seems like a difficult position for Google. Take Gmail for example. For GSuite users vs free personal users, the privacy handling and the information needed to be disclosed will be far different in Gmail.
I wonder will the end up creating a separate Gsuite Gmail app?
> Presumably, this was an automatic notice that pops up when Google's app updates hit a certain age and are meant to catch people who haven't been to the App Store in a while
So, statements in the screenshot like "the version you are using doesn't include the latest security features” are lies, uh ?
This policy was announced in June, what is taking Google so long? Do they really have that much to hide or is the iOS developer team really that incompetent?
Google believes in running out the clock. In it's antitrust investigations it always responds on the last day allowed... after requesting as many extensions as possible.
The truth is that the status quo of Google being a privacy-violating unregulated monopoly is incredibly profitable, so they're going to drag out changing that to the last possible moment.
Have you ever worked on really big complex app, working on top of even more complex backend, where suddenly big set of requirements changes?
Especially, as getting update right is really critical. People give big tech no credit for trying to be honest (and for often good reason - lots of their decision are shady/have more details that are omitted), but they won’t intentionally straight out lie about how they use your data - that’s a legal suicide. Huge amount of due diligence is needed when scope of what’s allowed is changing.
Why not just update the app and check
every user-tracking box on the form like Facebook did? We already know we are tracked at insane levels by Google.
Everybody is piling on Google here, but this is just a lag in Apples store.
Google pushed and update, the sever tests if you have the required update, if not directs you to the app store. Apple haven't made the update available in the store.
We see it all the time in games. It sucks. You have to go play something else for a while.
They got badly surprised by their own security warning.
They are lying about the situation while knowing we know they are lying.
No message control / (social) media control. Does Google even have a public relations teams? A press officer? Is anyone managing all of this? Hello? Is somebody home?
6 + 2 months without progress from a company with infinite money -what is going on at Google? Fits right in with what happened to Terraria.