Google and apple install tons of software basically without consent (os updates) , so an app being pushed like that is not surprising. It is worrying however that tech people dont seem to realize how great their tools are for totalitarian states , which push apps and spying much worse than this to their subjects. We really need to talk about users owning their devices and their software rather than leasing them. There is no device that allows users to control what it does , that's scary
You are explicitly allowing to install updates in phone's settings. It is made painfully clear.
The question here is about what mechanism Google used to install an app, can it be disabled, and what other kind of apps Google is capable of installing silently on the devices?
This is just software updating software, so a switch would just be a token gesture, unless it wasn't, in which case you need to have the software be loaded from some ROM and the ROM only writable when the switch was activated, in which case that would be a fantastic device.
But it also brings up the false sense of security, a floppy drive could just choose to ignore the switch and write anyways, just as the phone could secretly write the firmware.
... which does not actually make the medium non-writable but only acts as an indicator to the drive, which with the right firmware could just ignore it.
