Google spent $26 billion to hide this phone setting from you::undefined

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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The reason we’re able to pull back the curtain on the big business of default settings is because of an antitrust trial against Google underway in Washington, one of the largest in decades.

    The U.S. has accused Google of illegally using payments to phone makers and others to deter people from trying alternatives like the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo and or Microsoft-made Bing.

    To put that to the test, my colleague Tatum Hunter and I hit the streets of San Francisco and asked strangers to show us how to change the default search engine on their phone.

    There, Google’s market share has largely stayed the same; competitors say that’s because the choice screen is shown only once and also because it doesn’t give sufficient information about alternatives.

    iPhones ask users to make lots of decisions about privacy, including whether they want to give apps the ability to track them.

    Funny thing, though — Apple products don’t ask customers to make any privacy choices about their search engine, it’s just Google by default.


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