Should alternative Android distributions be described as protecting against surveillance capitalism as well in this section? Google Play Services and such collect plenty of information for Google from Android, which are sold and used for advertising purposes, correct? I’m not entirely sure to what extent this is mitigated by the privacy settings.
From your link:
By default, Android makes many network connections to Google to perform DNS connectivity checks, to sync with current network time, to check your network connectivity, and for many other background tasks.
I’d argue that it’s not yet surveillance capitalism. Google has already been burned collecting data it didn’t get a legal agreement for. These low level utility checks are more like a population ping for them. All it can do is reassure their investors about a healthy android market.
Yeah honestly surveillance capitalism is ubiquitous enough in software in general that it’s hard for me to think of any software recommendation category that isn’t appropriate for that threat model. Maybe the security focused linux distros and the Tor related stuff. Idk if that means it should be labeled explicitly in every section though.