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Mysterious Communication Connections by Top 500 Android Apps Have No Effect On User Experience

posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 20 2015, @04:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the stop-spying-on-me dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

MIT researchers have found that much of the data transferred to and from the 500 most popular free applications for Google Android cellphones make little or no difference to the user's experience.

Of those "covert" communications, roughly half appear to be initiated by standard Android analytics packages, which report statistics on usage patterns and program performance and are intended to help developers improve applications.

"The interesting part is that the other 50 percent cannot be attributed to analytics," says Julia Rubin, a postdoc in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who led the new study. "There might be a very good reason for this covert communication. We are not trying to say that it has to be eliminated. We're just saying the user needs to be informed."

The original paper [PDF] came via MIT.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 20 2015, @06:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 20 2015, @06:34AM (#265688)

    I made the mistake of including the google image in order to use maps, had to manually disable to many google services permanently because they would re-enable like zombies! Still couldn't permanently get rid of qscrilmsgtunnelservice.... Has full access to everything, disabling it has zero effect on my use of the phone. Tinfoil hat please.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 20 2015, @07:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 20 2015, @07:10AM (#265698)

    You should "freeze" them instead of disable.
    Also, the RIL in qscrilmsgtunnelservice means "Radio Interface Layer", which means it directly accesses your phones modem, so it may be needed for operations like receiving phone calls or SMS/MMS messages.

    And here is a FLOSS replacement for Google's Network Location Provider: http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-g-unifiednlp-floss-wi-fi-cell-tower-t2991544 [xda-developers.com]