Yet another reason why running GrapheneOS is a great idea. The surveillance state is now.

It's fine, they'll still be able to change the OS

https://sammyguru.com/breaking-samsung-removes-bootloader-unlocking-with-one-ui-8/

Oh...

Thank you Samsung for giving us, not one, but two reasons this week to not buy your overpriced shit.

I wonder what spyware they'd be willing to put in their phones in the US for the regime in charge.

Also, if I bought a Samsung phone while a dictator is in charge and it gets the update and I get the spyware — hypothetically speaking here — and by the time a progressive is in office, they're pushing updates that remove it, but my phone is outside the update period, how would I go about removing it? Just buy a new one at cost? Seems like that's something they'd let you do for free, though.

Has anyone actually analysed this app to see what information it can actually access? The few articles I've found don't elaborate.

Like, does it just track what games you play and websites you visit? Or can it log your keyboard, steal all your banking passwords and read all your private conversations?

i have a samsung phone and im not surprised to hear this. my phone keeps installing these crappy mobile games without my consent and i had to manually uninstall them a few times. so yeah, not much of a stretch.

That's why they say that free cheese exists only in traps.

(Or sometimes cheese paid for, but less than needed to not look for other sources of financing. Think all of modern electronics and the Internet.)

It's not about other schemes of profiting than paying forward not existing - it's about you the customer being interested in them not being used. They are always worse for you. The lesson of "free" stuff on the Internet.

Including free and open source software, with no doubt - because when a FOSS project could go the direction that would badly hurt corporate business relying on traps, it doesn't - because its scheme of existence is based on said corporate businesses' funding and developer participation and embrace and testing. And there won't be a discussion inside that project, no matter how democratic, because money likes silence. Nobody will even think about a direction not supported by work, and work is done by people, and people are paid. All of big FOSS events cost a lot ; some of it is in volunteer resources, but most of it is people on their jobs.

I'm honestly starting to think about going the Apple way - at least they only send hashes of the binaries you run to the daddy.