Damnit, David Byrne. What did you have to go and do that for? The man, who was very nearly a personal hero of mine, recently updated his Website to run his mouth about something that he doesn’t seem to really understand. There are few things that I absolutely cannot stand more than celebrities irresponsibly using their audience and authority to spread misinformation. David, you’re a smart guy! You know better than this.

Byrne’s misunderstanding had to do with Android 4.4 KitKat and two separate improvements made to the operating system in that release. The first was a major security fix, essentially sandboxing apps from accessing full external storage. The second change was a move by Google-branded apps to securely store their acquired data in “the cloud.” That first fix I’m surprised it took so long to implement, as it really was a pretty glaring security hole that relied on the good faith of developers not to abuse. Now, even malicious apps will be thwarted when they find they cannot access your external data. That fix does in its own right pose a few separate issues, namely that the app sandboxes are removed when the app is uninstalled (which arguably is good practice), but that’s a different topic entirely.

The major issue Byrne sees here is that second one, where Google apps are storing his data in the cloud. When you take a picture or video using Google’s default camera app, why can’t you specify that this data is saved on that giant SD card you purchased instead of being uploaded to the cloud? Even if you disable the cloud-saving, you’re left without any option to save your content onto your SD card, which is indeed a legitimate complaint. If that were a concern of mine, I’d use a different app instead of writing a lengthy blog post about how terrible Google is. Since, I don’t know, that’s kind of the point of Android. Here we’ve got a totally open app ecosystem, based on a free open-source operating system, where any developer can publish mostly any app. There are literally thousands of camera apps available, many for free, that you can easily set as your default and totally bypass the default system app.

David would argue here that I’m missing his point entirely. As a smart guy, he knows that he doesn’t have to use Google’s proprietary apps, but that doesn’t change the fact that their apps are behaving in a way he finds disagreeable: that an “invisible corporate hand” is going into his device and sucking up his content and has removed his option to save his content onto the SD cards he purchased. We can agree on this particular point, that Google’s removal of these features was indeed heavy-handed and that people who don’t know any better will end up unknowingly handing their data to Google without an obvious way to disable the “cloud saving” feature. But to that I say that Byrne is missing Google’s point: that it’s their app and that exactly what they do with your data is clearly outlined in their privacy policy and terms of service. If you haven’t read Google’s (surprisingly readable) policies, that’s willful ignorance. Not only is Google fully transparent about what it does with your data, in many cases it provides the user with the option to opt-out of targeted ads, or to take ownership of your data and take it somewhere else.

According to their terms of service (2014/05/16, see “Your Content in our Services”):

Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.

Since Google makes its money off of advertisements, and uses your data to offer you more relevant advertisements, is it really being malicious? Or just plain practical? It would be one thing if Google was sharing your content with advertisers in the background, or hand-sifting through your data, but instead they have automated systems that merely crawl your own content to help display ads that you might actually be interested in. Is that really so bad? Personally, I prefer it that way.

So maybe Google misstepped by taking away the save-to-SD function. Truthfully, that move doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it hardly makes Google the bad guy. I’m sure they would argue they were simplifying the experience for the user, though I’d say they over-simplified it. If asked what Google could do to better inform its users on its policies besides making them readable and easily accessible as shown above, some like David Byrne would likely answer that Google should instead be asking users to opt-in and give back more granular control of our data. That’s a fair point in itself, but doesn’t warrant putting a giant Google logo with devil horns on your homepage. That’s just amateur hour, knee-jerk propaganda. You can still voice your complaint without coming across like one of those guys. In the meantime, I’d encourage David Byrne to make his point without the unnecessary rhetoric, and make an effort to educate his readers instead of just panicking them. The theatrics here were just totally unnecessary and I’m very disappointed to see one of my favorite artists degrade himself so.