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Comment by jeffbee

4 years ago

A lot of this reveals the way that Google itself perceives Android devices, and also ChromeOS devices to a lesser extent, to be inside their infrastructure. Years ago Google SRE wanted to extend observability beyond their edge so that there could be an SRE team responsible for the performance of first-party mobile applications. So, there's an SRE team at Google with a dashboard that shows them Google search latency from Google app v42 and v43 which is deployed to 1% of clients. This is why there is so much telemetry.

Another big thing about Android is anti-abuse, keeping people from running ad click fraud in apps running on emulators. That is the whole DroidGuard thing that the paper mentions and doesn't explore further. It is a device-specific virtual machine and bytecode for the virtual machine which is intended to authenticate it as a real device, not an emulator.

Anyway check out this slide deck for how Google SRE views mobile as being in their world: https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/conference/protec...

PS that team is called MISRE, pronounced "misery" and some of the founders of that team migrated from "SAD SRE" make of that what you will.

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jeffbee

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ocdtrekkie  4 years ago

> A lot of this reveals the way that Google itself perceives Android devices, and also ChromeOS devices to a lesser extent, to be inside their infrastructure.

This quote should be more than enough to justify legally separating Google from ownership of both platforms. It is a similar problem we're seeing Tesla now extend to it's cars. Regardless of who legally owns the device, the company's employees feel entitled to data from it and de facto ownership of it. In most cases collecting data that the actual owner of the device is unable to see or utilize themselves.

  • jeffbee  4 years ago

    Not all of it is inaccessible to users. CPU profiles of ChromeOS, for example, are collected on user devices, aggregated, and checked into the public source code repos where anyone can use them, usually for optimizing a chromium build but any purpose you can think of.