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Android Phones Still Track You, Even When You Opt Out:
If you use an Android phone and are (rightfully!) worried about digital privacy, you’ve probably taken care of the basics already. You’ve deleted the snoopiest of the snoopy apps, opted out of tracking whenever possible, and taken all of the other precautions the popular how-to privacy guides have told you to. The bad news—and you might want to sit down for this—is that none of those steps are enough to be fully free of trackers.
Or at least, that’s the thrust of a new paper from researchers at Trinity College in Dublin who took a look at the data-sharing habits of some popular variants of Android’s OS, including those developed by Samsung, Xiaomi, and Huawei. According to the researchers, “with little configuration” right out of the box and when left sitting idle, these devices would incessantly ping back device data to the OS’s developers and a slew of selected third parties. And what’s worse is that there’s often no way to opt out of this data-pinging, even if users want to.
A lot of the blame here, as the researchers point out, fall on so-called “system apps.” These are apps that come pre-installed by the hardware manufacturer on a certain device in order to offer a certain kind of functionality: a camera or messages app are examples. Android generally packages these apps into what’s known as the device’s “read only memory” (ROM), which means you can’t delete or modify these apps without, well, rooting your device. And until you do, the researchers found they were constantly sending device data back to their parent company and more than a few third parties—even if you never opened the app at all.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you own a Samsung device that happens to be packaged with some Microsoft bloatware pre-installed, including (ugh) LinkedIn. Even though there’s a good chance you’ll never open LinkedIn for any reason, that hard-coded app is constantly pinging back to Microsoft’s servers with details about your device. In this case, it’s so-called “telemetry data,” which includes details like your device’s unique identifier, and the number of Microsoft apps you have installed on your phone. This data also gets shared with any third-party analytics providers these apps might have plugged in, which typically means Google, since Google Analytics is the reigning king of all the analytics tools out there.
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Wednesday October 13 2021, @06:30PM (1 child)
I have an old HTC that still works for calls and texting (too old for any apps to run). I do have access to cellular data, but it's off 99.9% of the time. On the rare occasion that either cell data or WiFi is enabled, several of the original, unwanted, and unremovable apps start (I force stop them, whenever possible) and the data usage meter climbs steadily when I have done nothing to justify it, not even opened a browser or other app.
Now that Apple has removed some of the most egregious blocks between my own access to my data through anything other than the Apple cloud, I would consider one if I thought that there was any hope of managing their version of the same exfiltration of data. Yes, I have heard about the supposed controls, but have not seen any evidence for their functionality on the phones of friends. Their data usage meters are always climbing, too, whenever cell data or WiFi are enabled.
I suspect that if anyone ever does make a truly free and open phone, Apple and Google will use any means, such as having it labelled a "tool for terrorists and pedophiles", to kill it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 13 2021, @07:19PM
I have a theory that this is why products like the PinePhone are perpetually in a dysfunctional pre-release state.
Also, software products like the Qt multimedia decoder suite have been a continuous treadmill of maintenance to keep apps working with for the last 15 years. I mean, in 2006 I coded up a quick video slicer / snippet playback app that worked brilliantly: only on a single OS (iOS), and a couple of iOS updates later it didn't work there either. Then, over the years, I'd revisit the multimedia suite and it was the same story again and again: little cross platform functionality, what did work would work for a year or two until the next OS update. I mean, FFS, I made an MP3 player that ran on Ubuntu 18.04 and Raspbian last year, and the default codec distribution in Ubuntu 20.04 broke it - something about the LibAv Gstreamer codecs in 20.04 just broke .mp3 playback using the vanilla Qt 5.x QAudioOutput methods. Disabling the LibAv codec then allows a "less preferred" codec to take over, and I mean, really, MP3? since 25 years now we should have stable MP3 playing software, but various license angst etc. continues to break things that were working for a short while, again, I suspect making licensed content sellers very happy (and probably so happy that they backchannel funding to those capable of perpetually breaking the toys that allow people to enjoy AV content.)
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