I found the update 404 media article, this article is based on: https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

It's behind a paywall, and I couldn't found a way to remove it. But from the top screenshot it seems like it's the same bullshit from the same company... We know from the past that they lie about this, why is it a news that they did the same thing again?

Better article about this story:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-isnt-tapping-your-device-to-hear-private-conversations

This is nearly a year old news, and noone ever could prove it.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-isnt-tapping-your-device-to-hear-private-conversations/

CMG is simply lying. Also originally it was not "leaked" it was published on their website, it's just the same bullshit from different source.

It was not just a "leak" this was literally on their website a year ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-isnt-tapping-your-device-to-hear-private-conversations/

Marketing people bullshitting to get investor money. Anyone can imagine non existent technology and lie on the internet, you don't have to believe everything

Yeah, maybe "working on" was too generous, "aware of the issue and some preliminary work was already done" would have been more correct

Here is some recent discussion if it's feasible at all: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/pull/2077

MicroG devs are working on fakeing play integrity api since 2023: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/2050

it seems that play integrity continue to change internally day to day... He is waiting that google stabilize it. Then will be a pull request.

The announcement comes after Twitter announced across-the-board job cuts earlier on Thursday, with plans to lay off 9 percent of its workforce, which equals about 350 people. The company also said in a letter to shareholders that it was going to prioritize some parts of its business, while deprioritizing others.

Source

Twitter was financially in a bad shape for a long time, the first year they generated some profit was 2018. Source Vine existed 2012-2017, I think they couldn't figure out how to monetize it. Twitter was a text based platform, tiktok was designed for video from conception.

But I still don't know why they didn't try to sell it instead of shutting it down.

Coub was also nearly shut down in 2022, it seems like it's hard to profitably maintain a short video service.

One more thing could have an important impact was music rights. Tiktok has special deals with record labels for background music, Coub was Russian, so they could just pirate music. Streaming wasn't big back than, only spotify existed, labels couldn't figure yet out how to milk internet users, so I guess Vine couldn't get as good deals as it would now. Too early, too legal.

IIRC Vine and Coub made it mainstream more than 12 years ago, it's not something new. Gifs are basically a prequel of the format.

If people wouldn't like it, it wouldn't survive this long, and wouldn't be copied by every other company and requested in threads like this. It's alright if you don't like them but please let other people have fun. You don't have to "learn" from everything, it's just jokes and light entertainment.

How would it otherwise? Network based location?

Yes. Your phone could triangulate its location from nearby celltowers ane wifi networks. Google has a database of wifi routers (actually that was the point of google streetview, they collected wifi bssids alongside taking photos, they also collect this data from android devices).

With microg you can select from different dbs for this, they are called 'UnifiedNlp backends': apple has a similar db from iphones, mozilla used to collect this data with a separate app for MLS (they shut down the project in 2024 march). Microg builds an on device private db as well, it will remembers the wifi networks and celltowers you were close to, and next time you are there it won't need gps, saves a ton of battery life. This was called Deja Vu, I love this name. Search for UnifiedNlp on fdroid you can find some more options.

Since MicroG 0.3 you don't have to install these separately, Mozilla and Deja Vu are builtin, and they are more than enough

Huh? Which rom asks this? Usually you have to go through hoops to get microg, and only a handful of roms have it builtin. It can only ask if you want to enable microg not installing it or not, microg to correctly work it should be installed in /system/priv-app, to do that after boot on device, you have to be root.

Do you use any app from aurora or outside fdroid? If your answer is no, than you can use android without a GMS package.

Also as I wrote, location won't work for you underground or inside concrete buildings. If you are fine with these kind of limitations than you can obviously.

Marwin (the main developer of microg) said in some interview that he doesn't want microg to exist, and in a perfect world we shouldn't need such workaround. I would be also happy if android wouldn't depend this muhc on google

Is snapchat still a thing? Never used that but I thought from screenshots and memes that tiktok killed it (never used that either)

(I reread ops question and I can only see the term open source 2 times, but whatever, I understand what you say, and I don't want to debate about semantics.)

The point with microG is it's still the best way if you want to use android. The other options are:

• Play services (GMS), or Huawei has some similar solution because of US trade embragoes.
• You can use android without play services but notifications won't work for most apps, even if you can open them. (UnifiedPush tries to solve notification part) Wifi and cell based location won't work
• I see microG as an acceptable middle ground. I still have to give up something to goog, but it's not much compared to GMS, and I can use all available apps