October 27, 2021
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0Android Smartphones Constantly Monitor Users
Irish researchers have found that Android smartphones collect a vast amount of information about their owners through system software. The collected data is sent to device manufacturers and selected third parties.
Android smartphones from Samsung, Xiaomi, and Huawei companies are constantly monitoring their owners. It was reported by the Gizmodo portal, citing a study by Trinity College in Dublin.
The list of the best smartphones to use for your security is here.
The whole truth about Android
Researchers from Ireland and the UK have tested Android-based smartphones and concluded that they constantly transmit a lot of personal information about the owners of the devices to Google and other companies.
The study examined the operation of Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, and Realme devices, as well as devices running LineageOS and /e/OS. In the end, it turned out that, with the help of system software, all the variants except the last one are constantly transmitting information about their owner to the smartphone manufacturer and third parties, as well as data on the use of applications. Of course, all this is a violation of users’ privacy, but at the same time, users are unable to stop the surveillance.
Learn more about worldwide surveillance here.
System applications are installed on smartphones by a vendor (a representative of the trademark that supplies and promotes the product) to endow the device with specific functions. These can include a camera or messaging app. The peculiarity of such software is that it is installed in a permanent storage device (ROM), which only the developer can change.
Which systems are affected?
Samsung Pass also cooperates with them, reporting when and how many times the user has used the application. Huawei transmits the information to Microsoft. Moreover, data is collected even by those applications that the subscriber has not even used.
So, any Android smartphone has collected a lot of information about the user, the hardware, the ID, and serial number of the device. It has created a unique digital fingerprint that can be used to track the actions of any phone owner. Xiaomi also transmitted user data to Google.
As a result, the mobile phone owner’s data is in the field of view of system programs that report this information further. For example, Xiaomi transmits Google Analytics. Google justified this by saying that all the data is needed for the correct operation of applications.
What’s wrong with Google? Read more about it here.
What to do to stay protected?
Worst of all, there is no way to disable or limit such actions. It also turned out that in some embedded system applications, such as miui.analytics (Xiaomi), Haytap (Realme), and Hicloud (Huawei), encrypted data can be decoded, which exposes them to the risk of hacking by intruders.
Resetting advertising IDs does not help either. If the user tries to clear their account, the data collection system will re-identify them without any problems.
