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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 Immerman on Wednesday October 13 2021, @08:33PM (1 child)
PR being the active word.
They are better, but have still been caught out hoovering lots of user data. Would you rather be spied on by someone who shares your data with anyone willing to pay, or who only sells the *results* of that spying? Either way they are almost certainly sharing all the data with the government - willingly, unwillingly, or even unknowingly.
Once collected, surveillance data belongs to anyone capable of getting their hands on it. And all the major players in both government and other organized crime can almost certainly get their hands on it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Tork on Wednesday October 13 2021, @08:55PM
Heh. "Lots". What a wonderfully vague term to use. Look I'm not saying Apple's a saint, but can you honestly say Apple's data gathering is anything at all like Google's? Would you be the slightest bit interested in an Apple branded search engine? Wasn't Apple Maps a big joke? Does anybody really consider Safari a major browser? Can any of these be boldly answered "yes" or "no" without a zillion qualifications?
Google makes something like $150 billion from ad revenue, Apple generates about $3 billion. Either PR really is the active word and is quite effective at keeping Apple in check or they're fundamentally different business models that yield very different results. Pick your poison, just don't throw out important data in the process. Google isn't. :P
p.s. No, I am not pushing for Apple, here. I'm just really shocked at how ready some of you are to handwave away Google's power over the internet over tribal phone-preferences.
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