NCSAM post 10: Use Android? Your phone may be handing over data, with no choice to discontinue it

I have two post 8’s, the last 8 should be 9, but I’m not changing it now. Here’s something in regards to Android, and I think I’m going to put this as an NCSAM article for today.


Hello folks. Welcome to another post here on the blog. Today, we’re going to talk about Android. Apparently, there’s a study that says that a phone that is minimally set up for service is sending tons of information to various companies like Microsoft and Facebook.

I worry about this as with IOS, you need to give permission to have apps access data, although I’ve heard in rooms that data is being sent to Apple without our knowledge as well. I’d rather trust Apple, as they’ve been known not to do what other companies have done.

The researchers intercepted and analyzed the data that was sent by the Android OS including the pre-installed system apps that we previously mentioned. The study assumes a situation where the device owner doesn’t enable his phone to share data but uses the default settings for everything else. The research team printed a chart that shows the data collected by each of the Android OS variants.

Here’s something else.

All of the companies whose Android OS variants were tracked shared information that can help identify a particular mobile device such as a handset’s unique
IMEI number. This data is transmitted along with data that the user can reset such as advertising IDs. But since the data is sent as a pair, resetting
the advertising ID won’t help the user since his device will always link to its IMEI identifier.

While I will be putting this as part of news notes, I’m wanting people to read the entire article Some versions of Android share users’ personal data with no chance to opt-out from Phone Arena to learn all of the details on what three well-known companies are doing at least with their stock versions of Android.

Sound off in the comments.

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