Largely the reason for doing this is to target ads, but all of these companies will also share this information indiscriminately with various governmental agencies. Companies match IMEI numbers and other identifiers of devices to other user data that makes linking these accounts together a simple game of connect-the-dots.
It should be no surprise that the four Android versions customized by the device manufacturers report a ton of user data, or that any device with a Google Apps (GApps) package reports a seemingly unending stream of user information back to Google servers, but some of the specific results that the research team found are definitely worth noting.įirst, the paper points out that all of these companies are trivially able to link devices to users. e/OS is built with privacy in mind, while LineageOS is more of a drop-in replacement which doesn’t specifically focus on privacy. The researchers studied operating systems from Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, and Realme which all also produce their own devices, but also looked at two alternative Android-based operating systems - LineageOS and /e/OS - that can be installed on some devices and customized for privacy if the user chooses. The report takes a look at six different “flavors” of Android and what each one is doing behind the scenes. Thanks to this recent privacy report on several different flavors of Android (PDF warning) we know a little bit more on specifically what the system apps are doing, what information they’re gathering and where they’re sending it, and exactly which versions of Android are best for those of us who take privacy seriously. While Apple keeps their mysteries to themselves and thus can’t be fully trusted, Android is much more open which paradoxically makes it easier for companies (and malicious users) to spy on users but also makes it easier for those users to secure their privacy on their own. But just how much the operating systems themselves did was largely a matter of speculation, especially for Apple devices which are doing things that only Apple can really know for sure. It was always known that both popular mobile operating systems for these devices, iOS and Android, “phone home” or report data about us back to various servers. On today’s internet we do all of these things with reckless abandon, and to make matters worse most of us carry around a device which not only holds all of our personal information but also reports everything about us, from our browsing habits to our locations, back to databases to be stored indefinitely. In those early days most users had a militant drive to keep any personal or identifying information to themselves beyond the occasional (and often completely fictional) a/s/l, and before eBay and Amazon normalized online shopping it was unheard of to even type in a credit card number. Not just in terms of technology, capabilities, and culture, but in the attitude most of us take when accessing the ‘net. We’ve come a long way from the Internet of the 90s and early 00s.