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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: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 13 2021, @08:30PM (1 child)
If you're really trying to hide some of your activities, you'd do well to have a public persona that you don't hide that's completely boring and normal. Like, your cell phone tracking data puts you at work, home, your kids' school, your nearest big-box store, and the nearest grocery store, while you leave the cell phone at home when you go to the political meet-up that was organized offline. And you have a Facebook profile that's cute pictures of your family and such, but doesn't include any discussion at all of political anything. And maybe a Twitter feed that has discussion of some professional issue you study that can't be used for anything nefarious, and also follows a celebrity or two.
It's a lot easier to keep a few specific things private than it is to keep your entire life private.
Or, alternately, just have the criminal stuff you're planning be in service to something that your country's law enforcement quietly agrees with: That worked for the people who planned what went down on January 6.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday October 13 2021, @09:15PM
And never mind the fact that you're now engaging in *exactly* the sort of subterfuge that Freedom of Speech was supposed to make unnecessary. Because pretty much the only way to influence the government democratically is through massive public outcry - which is extremely difficult for citizens to generate from the shadows (that mostly takes psy-op professionals with large budgets).
Because the sad truth is that government, especially at the federal level, has very little real interest in stopping crime. If they did, then the first thing they would do is arrest most of themselves and their friends. What they *are* interested in, and what freedom of speech and assembly, the right to a fair and speedy jury trial, etc,etc,etc. are all designed to curtail, is in silencing dissenting opinions as they amass ever greater institutional and personal power. That's true of pretty much every government in the history of civilization, and the US government is no exception, having been caught out illegally doing so on numerous occasions throughout the last century, and has almost certainly not been caught many more times.