SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 20 2015, @07:18AM
"not all of them mysterious."
So - because I know what some of the data flow is, I should just accept that all the data is benign. Sorry, that's not good enough. You don't have to be paranoid to understand that bad people have bad reasons to spy on you.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday November 20 2015, @08:01AM
No one said you should accept all data flows. And I pointed out that Google is changing the permissions system to accommodate more control.
So what, EXACTLY, is it that you want?
And what are you going to do for a smartphone until your wish is granted?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 20 2015, @08:22AM
I want cyanogen mod fine grained permissions to be standard fare on all smartphones. No spying, or more precisely, only spying that the user explicitly opts in to.