Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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Thank you so much for going into detail! That's exactly the kind of features breakdown explanation I was hoping for.
Interesting that it's Google of all companies implementing this stuff on their phones. Seems too coincidental to be accident. Maybe they have a security zealot in an executive position at Android, or maybe there's a power clash of some sort between them and law enforcement. Or maybe it's as simple as the government wanting a line of secure devices that they don't have to worry as much about taking abroad and Google was the contractor of choice. I'm too cynical to believe that they're doing it out of concern for their users under legal duress.
No problem, glad I could help! I'd like to think I'm pretty knowledgeable about GrapheneOS since I'm kind of a big privacy nerd, (though I could never match the nerd-iness of the actual GrapheneOS developers, they're on another level with this kind of thing) so if you or anyone else has any questions about GrapheneOS, feel free to ask me those too!
To address the rest of your comment, I'm not sure I'd personally go so far as to say it's because of any kind of "power clash" or government needs. It just boils down to PR and profit. I get being cynical, and I'm sure there's an extent to which it could be true, but I just doubt it given the other reasons they have. After all, I think we both know Google cares more about profit than they do any kind of morals or government feud
For example, GrapheneOS has memory tagging enabled by default, because it's a feature that's possible with some of the newer Pixel processing units. Google does not enable this on regular Pixels... unless you go to Developer Options > Memory Tagging Extension, and change it.
It's there not necessarily because Google really just cares so much about it for the reasons you mentioned, but just because it can allow developers to prevent certain vulnerabilities without too much additional work on their part, and that means it's both easier to develop apps, and there's less vulnerabilities Google has to worry about being reported.
Google doesn't have to add these features for any reason other than protecting themselves from bad press if their phones are hacked, and developer purposes. It's one thing for a company like Samsung, Motorola, LG, etc to have a vulnerability exposed in their phones, but they also don't develop Android.
So if you have the headline "Hundreds of Motorola phones vulnerable to [exploit most people will never understand]", it'll blow over easy. But if you have "All Google Pixel phones vulnerable to [exploit most people will also never understand]", and the article is also saying things about how it raises concerns about Android security as a whole, then it's just a bigger PR deal.
Not to mention that most developers are working on Pixels when they make apps, which means if they want to test any possible security features available from any Android vendor, they can kind of just rely on Pixels to have all of them in one place.
Like if you want to test how your app could use a phone's TPM module, you don't need to go out and pick a specific model of Samsung that happens to have it, you just use a Pixel.
If you need to test for memory leaks, you use a Pixel with memory tagging.
If you need to test accessory compatibility with a USB-C port that suddenly disables all connections, you use a Pixel with a hardware-disable-able port.
If you need to develop an app that can rely on separate phone hardware to externalize random number generation, you use a Pixel with a TPM component.
Essentially to just shorten all that down into what I suppose I probably could have just said from the beginning: Google adds all of these security features because it's good for press (when they prevent vulnerabilities from happening), and it's good for profit. (when developers turn to their phones to make apps, and thus make apps for the whole Android ecosystem faster & safer, and make apps that conveniently work best on Pixels)