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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 13 2021, @08:51PM (1 child)
The base OS image is on a read-only partition. There is also a writable 'overlay' partition that holds software updates and log files. Not all system apps can be disabled, and some that can get re-enabled any time an update comes through. I have an Android phone who's manufacturer cheaped out by going with a Chinese OTA update provider and they forcibly installed the PRC's mandatory spyware, with no way to turn it off, despite that being a contract violation. By the time I figured out what the problem was it was too late to return it, so it sits on a shelf with the battery out.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday October 13 2021, @09:25PM
Sounds to me like a prime case to take to small claims court. Regardless of warranty, a clear contract violation puts you in a position to claim restitution, and small claims court is cheap, doesn't require a lawyer (though you might want to briefly consult one beforehand to get your ducks in a row, and make sure you actually have a case), and very, very often results in default judgements against corporations that can't be bothered to spend thousands of dollars of lawyer time over it (and that's just the round-trip flight).
Or so I've heard. I've never resorted to it myself. IANAL, etc.