One of them was that Google offered to synchronize my Gmail address book + calender with Android. The data is with Google anyway so I decided that it is not a big deal. And voilà, all my contacts, including phone numbers, are on my new phone. Amazing, considering my heart attack after my old cell broke down for which I did not have any backups.
All this comes at a very high price.
Since I started blogging and working on my PhD, I also started to use Twitter. So I wanted to download a Twitter app from the Android app market. It is incredible that the official Twitter app asks permission to access my phone’s address book. Remember, my phones address book is just a copy of my Gmail address book. I see how it helps Twitter to increase their service but to me, it became just too easy to share very sensitive data with companies that you might not (?) trust. I wonder whether the service Twitter offers to us will really improve that much if we share our private address book with the company. In my opinion, the small improvement we get does not justify their need to access my private address book. What would I have to promise someone to have a copy of his address book?
Can I escape?
I decided not to install the Twitter app. But does that really make sense? I guess most people don’t mind. After all, it is Twitter, a well known brand, that asks for the data. Additionally, Twitter is a communication service, so it makes sense to share this kind of data. However, even if I don’t share, Twitter can still guess the entries of my address book. Most of my friends who use Twitter with an android phone will probably accept the terms and condition of the Twitter app. Does not installing the app really help to protect my and my friends(!) privacy?
It is amazing that I am thinking right now about the consequences of blogging my experience of interviewing with Google when exactly this company creates structures that make us all sit in a glass house! I am very sure that this is intentionally like this. Please don’t missunderstand me. My first impression of Android is very good and I knew before that it encourages you in several ways to share data with anyone. Still, Android is probably one of the most useful tools which were brought to customers within the last ten years. I am only pointing out that things are changing very fast these days.
Which Android apps do I need?
So far I have:
- Google Maps
- Gmail
- Google Search
- Google Voice Recognition
- Google Reader
- Google News
- Tweetdeck (without sharing my address book !)
- Ankidroid
- Google Docs
- Google Calendar
What else would you suggest? And no, I don’t want a Facebook app. (-: