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Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

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11–20 of 320 posts

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#11

Good that the root cause is being addressed. In the meantime, I'll be reducing the symptoms by routing all my DNS traffic through my pi.hole instance.

I wouldn't be surprised if these mentioned apps comes with google's dns resolvers baked in, in that case routing through pihole doesn't help here.

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#12
post #3

I wish Microsoft didn't kill windows mobile. The Android monopoly is terrible

Don't rely on vendors to help you out of this conundrum, instead use what you have at your disposal to escape the duopoly. Get a supported Android device - there are hundreds of those by now - and install an AOSP-derived distribution like LineageOS. Leave out the Google bits, i.e. no 'gapps', no Google account, no nothing. If you need 'apps' which rely on the Google Services Framework use microG [1] but be aware of the fact that even this free software implementation of GSF needs to connect to Google to do its thing, i.e. try to find 'apps' which don't rely on GSF to start with. Use F-Droid or another alternative repository for you 'app' needs and something like Aurora Store (which you'll find on F-Droid) for those 'apps' which can only be found in the 'Google Play store'. Install a firewall (available on F-Droid and elsewhere) and set it to block all traffic by default. Configure it to allow selected 'apps' and system services to access those parts of the network (LAN, WAN, Mobile Data and VPN) you think they need. You can use the Log service to monitor which apps try to access the network.

Once you've got something like this set up the way you want it you're mostly there. The radio firmware will still be outside of your control and probably open to exploitation by the Three Letter Agencies of the world, for now there is not much that can be done about this other than to get a device with totally separate baseband processor, i.e. not integrated into the SoC. These used to be common but are as rare as hens' teeth now. There are some - e.g. the Librem 5 - but most devices come with an integrated baseband subsystem. Then again, for the purpose of circumventing the duopoly this is irrelevant so it can be ignored by all but those who also want to limit access to their devices by TLAs.

I've been using AOSP-derived distributions for as long as I've been using Android - close to 10 years - and have never found reason to regret my choice. LineageOS has OTA updates just like vendor distributions, the user experience is that of 'clean Android' - no bloatware.

[1] https://microg.org/fdroid.html

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#15
> Under active use, Android devices transfer about 11.6MB of data to Google servers daily, or 350MB per month, it's claimed, which is about half the amount transferred by an iPhone.

Interesting, so 350MB of data per month is abuse, iPhones 175MB per month isn't. I guess Google now has to half their data use for it to be at parity with Apple and we're all fine?

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#16
post #5
post #2

Couldnt this simply be the result of push notification checking and similar things that are done in the background? I do think the total amount of data used is a bit much but this do not seem unreasonable at all.

The complaint spends several paragraphs detailing the types of traffic, the destination servers of that traffic, and what applications were running. It is doubtful, if the complaint is correct, that this resulted from push notifications.

If it's correct - it feels like it's grasping at straws towards the end there though. They're claiming Google is preloading ads and charging that as an impression, which I'm (at least with my experience of integrating both Apple and Google Ads) isn't a practice at all.

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#18

Good that the root cause is being addressed. In the meantime, I'll be reducing the symptoms by routing all my DNS traffic through my pi.hole instance.

I wouldn't be surprised if these mentioned apps comes with google's dns resolvers baked in, in that case routing through pihole doesn't help here.

Afaik, some apps like Netflix that rely on geo-blocking for their content licensing do it already and it's only a matter of time until they switch to DNS over HTTP so requests cannot be altered at all.

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#19
post #15

> Under active use, Android devices transfer about 11.6MB of data to Google servers daily, or 350MB per month, it's claimed, which is about half the amount transferred by an iPhone. Interesting, so 350MB of data per month is abuse, iPhones 175MB per month isn't. I guess Google now has to half their data use for it to be at parity with Apple and we're all fine?

It doesn't say that, since it says the iPhone uses more. And it's a reference to a different test the article author added for context, not a claim about what's "ok".

Re: Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads

#20
post #15

> Under active use, Android devices transfer about 11.6MB of data to Google servers daily, or 350MB per month, it's claimed, which is about half the amount transferred by an iPhone. Interesting, so 350MB of data per month is abuse, iPhones 175MB per month isn't. I guess Google now has to half their data use for it to be at parity with Apple and we're all fine?

Errr wouldn’t that be 700MB/month for an iPhone?
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