Please dont misunderstand what I said to mean that a new iOS device has anything resembling user switching, they do not. iOS as a unix derived operating sytem has internal processes which run as different user IDs but are not “user IDs” in the sense that you can directly interact with them.
Actually, some android distributions implement multiple users. I know from experience that Cyanogenmod implemented that about 2 years ago.
But multiple users or who owns the root account aren’t quite the point here, I think. What is the point is that a single person, identified by name, address , birth date, etc… is uniquely linked to whatever is done with the device. That is possible even if there are multiple user accounts. It just means that all what is done under a particular account i.d. will also be linked to a user known by name and address.
Google, Apple, Facebook, etc… uniquely identify a given user because they typically request a credit card and/or phone number. Either one requires identification in many countries.
Each of these firms also typically leaks to their servers everything you do on your phone or computer: contacts, calendar data, position, name and passwords of wifi networks used, web and search history, what programs are installed and used, etc… Google and Apple also keep all your passwords (Facebook tries to replace them by “facebook sign in”), with some encryption. It is not entirely clear how secure that encryption is (in the best case, it is not more secure than the user’s choice of password, typically weak on a smartphone).
I see plenty of risks with that, the most obvious being identity theft and probably the most widespread being price fixing. But these bring us a little far from the original subject.
All our passwords? The only passwords that Google should see are the ones to Google accounts. Are you saying that it snoops at the OS level and logs them when we enter passwords for other sites/apps using Keepass (or whatever password manager you use on your phone)?
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Google chrome offers to synchronize all your internet passwords between machines via their servers.
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