![but seriously this fast food situation is getting out of control [Tommy Siegel]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/333c7b0d-a459-48ce-baf4-108ba3f5aa2d.png){kind=link}
Tommy Siegel | Bluesky
Transcript
Single panel comic
Illustration of a highway with 3 billboards for fast food chains. A bridge is visible in the background, as are power lines running along side of the service road.
Each billboard has a chain logo, with secondary text below.
Wendy’s
- Your fifth favorite burger is now an app
McDonald’s
- Will you give us your data for food?
Burger King
- Guess what: No app? No food
For a while, you could get fries or a McChicken for free or nearly do with the app. Like 5 years ago.
If you’re getting a deal, it’s fine? People pay iPhone prices for Google Pixel phones and don’t care that Google makes like $1700 a year off their data, and they defend this.
If you’re not getting a deal, don’t use the app. If you used it before but you don’t use it now, that data isn’t still helping them. It’s stale. Like a lot of their food. And that Pixel phone.
Tbh, Google Pixels have an unlocked bootloader, which is pretty rare nowadays, and nothing stops you from installing an OS without Google services. And I highly doubt they are able to extract any meaningful data when you are using such OS, even if there are hardware backdoors installed. It’s just extremely hard to do complicated* stuff, including data collection, while not being detected, and with just access to low level hardware; network packet analysis would give away any such attempts immediately. (*as in ‘more complicated than a few hundred assembly instructions’)
The problem with a third party ROM without Google Services is that a lot of these apps simply won’t work without Google Services present. You might as well be using a flip phone as far as this stuff is concerned.
I am using a phone without Google Services with no issues regarding YouTube, banking apps, etc. How?microG, an open source implementation of Google Services, and it works pretty damn well. Because it’s open source, I know that Google cannot steal any data I am not knowingly giving them :)
Modem firmware is a bit more than a few hundred assembly instructions. It’s mostly owned by Qualcomm, implementing trade secret designs made up by the boards of all sorts of corporations. Yes, even on the Samsung SoC design ordered by Google. That’s the price of phone calls.
Yeah, the mysterious Intel ME probably does similar things, but nonetheless these subsystems don’t have capabilities nearly as huge as the main OS, so they can’t store a lot of data, or do a lot of computation, or do stealth networking - (rant warning) such as embedding data in packets, that would require stealing the cryptographic keys from the main RAM, or even from other physical modules, basically so much convolution, that would be defeated by a simple update to the networking stack with changed offsets etc., I mean you would have to do crazy things to embed a universal rootkit you can never update yet is never detected doing shady stuff. This sounds more in the area of CIA capabilities, not really hardware manufacturers, but I really doubt they would risk revealing something so serious just to collect some meaningless data. TL;DR CIA backdoor probably exists, data collection backdoors are not feasible.
Intel ME can, in fact, inject packets, for it’s intended purpose of managing laptops at enterprise level. Don’t know how exactly but it was said it’s running minix, so I guess there are drivers hardcoded for some adapters. IIRC (source: truss me bro) it could use Wi-Fi in raw mode without the OS, associate by itself and stuff.
But uh, yeah, about the modem: it’s less that there’s some evil backdoor with global conspiracy but more that the cell towers can determine precise location at no cost (stored for a while which cops can look at) and that there’s radio fingerprinting and stuff, with a whole entire load of nothing you can do about it because of how little we know. Pretty harmless when radio is off. Not really phoning anyone with your phone anymore but yeah.
Yeah, that is inevitable, that’s indeed the price you pay for using public infrastructure. It is going to get a lot worse, Flock cameras being just the heralds of things to come. But this cannot be effectively fought at the personal level, this is just a matter of who has the political power. I am much more interested in what we, as individuals can do that the government can do nothing about. Basically we have kinda trustworthy public encryption algorithms, so preventing side channel attacks and trying to make hardware verifiably safe is IMO the principal battle to fight right now.
Yeah, they definetely kept the best deals for people that used the app as incentive to use the app. Now that focus has kind of shifted and the deals have been cut back to a minimum and its the same ones every time. The free fry is still cool and sadly the only way to get a 20 piece nugget for $5 bucks. Its nuts, but they want $5 for a 10 piece now which is nuts. If you cant get a deal dont go, but sometimes you can get everything for a decent price still and thats when I will sometimes go.