My concern is where the pivot point is. Sure Google should remove if any APPs' idea is to spy people. However that made Google/APPLE too much power over developers or users. What if I want my dog has a smart phone spy mode: "on" so I can find him when he's lost?
If giant companies can control what you can publish today, they can control what layout you should have on your APPs next week, they can control what contents is allowed next month, then they can decide if you are allow to communicate before you even noticed.
But you could already set your dog up with a smartphone and turn location tracking on. In fact I was looking at that exact setting on my Android phone today, and as a dog woner who sometimes looks after other people's dogs I have thought about this functionality, to go in a small collar device or something.
but that's not spy ware. Spy ware is where you report on location or something but conceal that from the person using the phone.
The reason why this became a topic is only because technology, soft/hardware developer really make a lot of money right now.
I remember reading this in HN:" How to detect female-ism? Don't just focus on the fancy job like CEOs, Founders who made million of dollars, you also need to look at mine workers, bus drivers these dangerous jobs." ask yourself why female-ism not talk about women need to work at those fields too?
Then, if you read "revenge of the nerd" by paul graham, you will understand more.
Now I'm having trouble logging in to GMail: that link set a cookie saving my language as Japanese! D:
edit: Found the "language" option on Google sign-in -- it's the scroller in the bottom right labelled "日本語". There's a small blue logo next to it that looks like the UN flag. Hope this helped someone.
edit #2: It's also in the URL, replace /intl/jp/ with /intl/en/ (for English)
I think users without prior IME experience may have a hard time image what is the purpose of sync or what does it do. It's a user trained Bayesian db where you can input your most used words/combinations very fast.
It's like auto-complete in IMEs or Google Suggest where you can get a list of "hints" ordered by popularity.
Baidu IME does the same, except, according to OP:
> ... sends users’ information even when the function is turned off.
If giant companies can control what you can publish today, they can control what layout you should have on your APPs next week, they can control what contents is allowed next month, then they can decide if you are allow to communicate before you even noticed.