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An idle Android smartphone sends user data back to Google servers nearly ten times more frequently as an Apple device sends data back to Apple servers.
This is just one of the many findings of a 55-page research paper [pdf] published this week by research agency Digital Content Next. The research looked at what type of data is sent back to Google servers from idle Android devices.
The overall conclusion of the research is that Google tracks its users more often and collects more information about their movements and behavior when compared to Apple or to Google's ability to track users on Apple devices.
[...] For starters, researchers said that while a user interacts with a phone, 46% of all communications sent to Google servers were to Google's publisher and advertiser products, such as Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AdWords, and AdSense.
"Magnitude wise, Google's servers communicated 11.6 MB of data per day (or 0.35 GB/month) with the Android device," researchers said. "This experiment suggests that even if a user does not interact with any key Google applications, Google is still able to collect considerable information through its advertiser and publisher products."
[...] Moreover, even if most of the data Google collects about users is anonymized, researchers said that there are various details that Google accumulates from the same device that can deanonymize users.
For example, researchers said that advertising identifiers such as DoubleClick cookie IDs allow Google to track a user across web pages and apps, and associate "anonymous users" with known Google accounts.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday August 28 2018, @10:16AM
Mobile Chrome I expect.
But Firefox is available for Android. Oh, sorry.
Perhaps there is a browser for Android that psychotics like me can use without stimulating our paranoia?
A significant advantage of using Mobile Websites as opposed to Mobile Apps is that it is significantly more difficult - but _not_ impossible! - to embed Mobile Websites with all the analytics that one can with Mobile Apps, where they know about your every tap.
You can block about half the Mobile Website analytics by unlocking your bootloader - and yes, Google really _does_ document how to do that, so as to enable you to develop your own firmware - then blackholing all the web bug servers in your phones /etc/hosts.
You can do that in iPhone to: once you've jailbroken in, you'll find that iOS Looks Just Like macOS - the operating system formerly known as "Mac OS X" - and has _many_ open source components for which apple really _does_ supply source:
https://opensource.apple.com/ [apple.com]
Anyway once you've jbed your iToy just scp your new hosts file to your phone.
But you can't use Facebook while at the same time blocking the Facebook Pixel. FB somehow manages to avoid being burnt in effigy by calling it a "Pixel" and not a "Web Bug".
What I'd like to do is write an HTTP Proxy within an App that would randomly change the ID number that's a query parameter to the Pixel's URL.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]