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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: 4, Informative) by urza9814 on Friday November 20 2015, @02:13PM
This is why I love Cyanogenmod...
Quick example -- I recently installed WhatsApp (after my coworkers spent weeks harassing me about it...) It wants a hell of a lot of access, but I'm not giving it. At first the app wouldn't work at all, until I relented a bit and gave it access to my contacts list, since it apparently doesn't have its own. It's tried to *change* my contact list 27 times so far -- every single attempt has been denied. It wants permission to use my camera and microphone, alter the text messages already stored on my device, change my network settings, read my calendar and call log...but I don't give it those permissions. Although to be fair, Cyanogenmod monitors how many times it attempts to use those permissions too, and so far it hasn't. But I'm not taking any chances. It's read my contact list successfully 1015 times (and been denied 635); it's used the vibrate function successfully 29 times, given 62 notifications, woken the device up 2181 times (hmm...I'm going to switch that to denied actually....)
I love this privacy guard feature. Apparently something similar is coming to stock Android eventually, but for now Cyanogenmod is a good way to go. Still doesn't help with situations like your weather app sending data to Google since it's just network or no network...but that's why I rooted the device so I can route all my traffic though proxies. Google thinks I'm in Romania right now.