If it provided a feature to automatically block incoming dick pics, which Google claims it’s for, was fully local, and only scanned incoming messages, not my own gallery, which is what Google claims, I would likely find it useful. There is nothing wrong with the idea in general.
At the very least it wastes your battery
Again, if it’s an optional feature that you can choose to turn on or off, there is nothing wrong with that.
But your words confuse me. Either it’s not true at all or it happens.
The idea is pretty simple, so it would be surprising if it wasn’t happening at all. But there is a huge difference between “there probably exist some examples that do that” and a sweeping statement about all of them in general.
They removed don’t be evil long time ago
See, this is why I like proof. If you go to Google’s Code of Conduct today, or any other archived version, you can see yourself that it was never removed. Yet everyone believed the clickbait articles claiming so. What happened is they moved it from the header to the footer, clickbait media reported that as “removed” and everyone ran with it, even though anyone can easily see it’s not true, and it takes 30 seconds to verify, not even 5 hours.
Years later you are still repeating something that was made up just because you heard it a lot.
Of course Google is absolutely evil and the phrase was always meaningless whether it’s there or not, but we can’t just make up facts just because it fits our world view. And we have to be aware of confirmation bias. Yeah Google removing “don’t be evil” sounds about right for them, right? It makes perfect sense. But it just plain didn’t happen.
Why suspicious? I have genuinely never read a news story about a virus sending different versions of itself to different OSs. I’m sure it happens, but it doesn’t seem common at all, and you are claiming it very matter-of-factly so I am interested to know more.
Do you have any data to back up that claim? I don’t think that’s true at all, it would be very rare.
Do we have any proof of it doing anything bad?
Taking Google’s description of what it is it seems like a good thing. Of course we should absolutely assume Google is lying and it actually does something nefarious, but we should get some proof before picking up the pitchforks.
They actually do, they do post all their videos with normal titles and separate no clickbait thumbnails on separate channels.
Yeah 100% agree you should link to the project site, not Flathub.
What’s wrong with Flatpak? I like the separation of system packages with the system package manager, and user-level random apps on Flatpak.
Apps I write put config files in XDG_CONFIG_HOME/appname/, which is usually ~/.config/appname/. What’s wrong with that?
One could think so, but no cybersecurity experts share such opinion to my knowledge.