Basically it doesn’t do loads of things if I don’t tell Google my inside leg measurement.
The permissions are endless: Where am I?, link this account to my Google account, and that account to my Google account, connect these calendars.
I have to say that I never had anything like this on my iPhone.
Yes, Apple is a closed App store, but this never bothered me – it is just a service I used. Like the Android Market. I might have missed out on a few Apps, but I all I want to do is the basic things on such a piddling screen.
But Apple never gathered the information Google tries to get out of me. The Android just tries to use Google for everything. Gmail, Calendar, Address Book. And I have to go round switching everything off. Then something else crawls out of the woodwork, because I actually do want to read my gmail on the device, so have to tell it my account. So suddenly my address book offers to link up all the contacts it has found in gmail to my address book proper.
Apple had .mac or MobileMe or whatever it was, but I never subscribed, and the iPhone worked fine. Just because I need to have a Google account to join some groups, Google works like hell to make sure that Google becomes my main supplier of everything, and actually makes life difficult for me if I don’t. And keeps on squirrelling my information away. I can imagine that most people just give up and hand it all over.
The iPhone manages to provide seamless integration between the Apps without the server knowing who I am – why can’t the Android?
And in the end I trust Apple more than Google, and certainly after this. In 25 years as an Apple user I have never seen any information leak out. However, after a few years using Google, if I go to all sorts of web pages I am offered products in the middle of them based on what I have searched for and where I was in the world last.
