there interesting petition going on against all those useless resp. privacy violating preinstalled apps on the devices shipped by most android vendors:
“Today, Privacy International and over 50 other organisations have submitted a letter to Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai asking Google to take action against exploitative pre-installed software on Android devices…”
there is also a german news article about this topic available:
i hope, /e/ will also learn from this kind of slowgrowing public discontent at one time or another, that it isn’t very wise to to infantilize users, by giving them no simple chance to deinstall e.g. the weather-troian-horse widget etc.
Nice initiative, although it does not concern /e/ users at all. For it would be even better if the big manufacturers stuff their devices even more with bloatware. Definitely a reason to switch to /e/
…just use the search function of this forum, type in “uninstall default app”, and you’ll immediately get 29 results and notice, that /e/ is unfortunately also affected by this issue!
many users have already asked for the possibility to remove default apps and the /e/-maintainer always promised a solution, but up to now it’s still an open issue – perhaps not as weighty as in case of other vendor-ROMs, but in principle it’s just the same kind of flaw.
I agree, e has a different attitude though. Hopefully those default apps will be removable soon.
While I suppose google will do nothing - they are keen on getting as much data as they can. Those apps (free services) are in the first line backdoors to your personal data.
Are you saying the Google Weather widget is trojan horse? Or /e/ weather widget is trojan horse?
both of them!
if you really want to improve the privacy of mobile devices, you simply shouldn’t run applications, which call home rather frequently and request location referring data.
sure, some people may not care about the obvious side effects of this kid of services, but others do!
and it’s really a shame, that /e/ doesn’t handle it a little bit more careful then google resp. don’t give users the freedom to decide for themselfs if they want run this crap on their phones or uninstall it.
It does. Been waiting too long for the possibility to remove default apps without either breaking the system, or the app just coming back the first update.
@mash, I see what you’re saying, but is there really any practical value in this? As long as the location data is not going to Google (or Facebook, Amazon, etc.) it would seem to meet the privacy objectives of the /e/ project. If your goal is to not share location data with ANY external entity whatsoever, well then owning a mobile phone is not for you. The phone’s radio is constantly pinging the network, and the phone company can locate you and track you at all times using cell tower triangulation, no apps required. The mobile phone hardware itself is therefore a “trojan horse” by your definition, regardless of what OS it runs or which apps are installed.
Personally, my goal is not to provide data to Google, Facebook, Amazon, or any other large commercial entity that aggregates, analyzes, and sells my data, so the /e/ project meets that goal perfectly as-is.
