Android Q Reaches Public Beta With Improved Privacy, Opus/AV1 Support, ANGLE On Vulkan

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Android Q Reaches Public Beta With Improved Privacy, Opus/AV1 Support, ANGLE On Vulkan

Google today rolled out their first public beta/development release of the upcoming Android Q that will be formally released in the second half of 2019...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Android-Q-Beta-Released

[tildearrow]

Improved privacy? Google is anything but privacy.

[Naib]

installing now.
its a 900Meg download but it is REALLY slow to download, their colo must be seeing some action

[cl333r]

Improved privacy? Google is anything but privacy.

I think privacy in the sense "your mom won't find out" not "Google won't find out".

[cybertraveler]

Reading through the blog post, it seems that they really have made some nice privacy improvements... however:

• Most of the improvements are centred around protecting you from third party apps. This is good, however I expect the actual Google OS will ensure that Google (and all the entities connected to it) get access to lots of your juicy data; especially if you make heavy use of Google services (mail, calendar, file storage etc etc).
• Phone manufacturers may selectively disable privacy features.
• If you are given a fixed ROM by your phone manufacturer you have no idea if it actually contains privacy respecting code or not. Same deal with the Whatsapp communication app. People were talking about how great it is for privacy, but you are only given a binary so you largely have to trust that the app you are delivered is the same app that the security auditors said has "good privacy".
• As long as phones have modems running proprietary firmware which have access to unencrypted, main, system memory, you have a very deep privacy danger lurking in your phone.
• Finally: this is Google we're talking about.
• ...
• Google
• ...
• "privacy"
• ...
• Google
• ...
• "privacy"
• ...

Houston; I think we have a problem.

[Yoshi]

Download for Pixel 2 XL (1227.0 MB) is really fast here. Nothing to complain about. Let's see how it'll work out.

[wswartzendruber]

What AV1 implementation does it have?

[Mel Spektor]

Reading through the blog post, it seems that they really have made some nice privacy improvements... however:

• Most of the improvements are centred around protecting you from third party apps. This is good, however I expect the actual Google OS will ensure that Google (and all the entities connected to it) get access to lots of your juicy data; especially if you make heavy use of Google services (mail, calendar, file storage etc etc).
• Phone manufacturers may selectively disable privacy features.
• If you are given a fixed ROM by your phone manufacturer you have no idea if it actually contains privacy respecting code or not. Same deal with the Whatsapp communication app. People were talking about how great it is for privacy, but you are only given a binary so you largely have to trust that the app you are delivered is the same app that the security auditors said has "good privacy".
• As long as phones have modems running proprietary firmware which have access to unencrypted, main, system memory, you have a very deep privacy danger lurking in your phone.
• Finally: this is Google we're talking about.
• ...
• Google
• ...
• "privacy"
• ...
• Google
• ...
• "privacy"
• ...

Houston; I think we have a problem.

lol
asking google for privacy is like asking Lord Voldermort to volunteer at the soup kitchen.

[Mel Spektor]

nowadays I'm trying boromite https://www.bromite.org/system_web_view it replaces chrome and chromium android web component with an anti fingerprint tailored version. At least google leaves you with the option to replace every single component, apple doesn't give you that.

[hax0r]

Improved privacy? Google is anything but privacy.

Amen, more like improved data mining heuristics and spyware improvements in GoogleServices proprietary runtime. But at least vanilla AOSP isn't as harmful.