Your item (3) definitely seems to match the current situation in the wild - FAANG companies are genuinely invested in maintaining their brand and reputation and so I do completely agree that they wouldn't tend to collect seemingly shady or 'underground' data themselves.
I think the definition of malware is blurring though. On some websites when I view the list of advertisers & third parties listed in consent dialogs, it's literally hundreds of them. There's no way to tell how many of those are equally motivated to protect user data and be on best behaviour.
It's also easy to forget that many users simply don't have the same understanding or reasoning about phone permissions that the audience on HN does.
I worry a great deal that we're walking into a world where older generations in particular are exploited by technology via a bombardment of settings and dialog boxes -- and that we're veering away from the real promise of technology, which is to provide clear, simple, fast and effective life improvements.
> I think the definition of malware is blurring though. On some websites when I view the list of advertisers & third parties listed in consent dialogs, it's literally hundreds of them. There's no way to tell how many of those are equally motivated to protect user data and be on best behaviour.
I worked on a side project a few years ago for price checking stuff. When I was working on the toys r us integration I noticed their site loaded insanely slow. So I dug deep and the site had dozens of hits to random urls. After doing a bit of spelunking - whois lookups, etc - the webpage was having my browser contact pretty much every major (or subsidiary of) tech company you could think of: oracle, ibm, cisco, facebook, etc. etc. etc.
It made me realize how utterly insane the web has gotten.
I think the definition of malware is blurring though. On some websites when I view the list of advertisers & third parties listed in consent dialogs, it's literally hundreds of them. There's no way to tell how many of those are equally motivated to protect user data and be on best behaviour.
It's also easy to forget that many users simply don't have the same understanding or reasoning about phone permissions that the audience on HN does.
I worry a great deal that we're walking into a world where older generations in particular are exploited by technology via a bombardment of settings and dialog boxes -- and that we're veering away from the real promise of technology, which is to provide clear, simple, fast and effective life improvements.