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Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

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Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#111

Post by avianlyric »

mankyd wrote: post #106
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an Ultra Wideband radio in the iPhone 11 and newer that isn't legal to use in all countries. Apple uses a location request sometimes just to determine if the device can legally run that radio or not.

If that's the case, they wouldn't need to report the location back to themselves, would they? The phone would simply check its coordinates, and turn it on or off.

I don’t think anyone is saying that iOS does report back to Apple (and I don’t think there is any evidence that iOS does this).

The original concern was caused because iOS would still activate location services and display the icon during these checks, even if you had turned location services off completely in settings.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#112

Post by titzer »

mankyd wrote: post #3

Not mentioned in the headline: When the user is _not_ logged in, iOS collects "location" whereas Android does not. I am actually a little surprised that iOS would gather this information. What use would it serve?

> When the user is _not_ logged in, iOS collects "location" whereas Android does not.

This may be only technically true. It's not Android, it's Google Play Services, which collects "anonymized", high-accuracy[1] location data constantly.

[1] Yeah, that's actually a contradiction-in-terms. There is no such thing as anonymized, high-accuracy location data.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#113

Post by threeseed »

kllrnohj wrote: post #58
teraflop wrote: post #25

"20X more telemetry", in terms of data usage, is a pretty meaningless statistic on its own (unless it's large enough to affect your mobile data cap or something). For instance, I would consider it a much bigger privacy violation for my phone to transmit my exact location every hour than my current CPU usage every 10 seconds.

Which Apple is apparently doing - they send location, local IP, and nearby wifi mac addresses even when you're not logged in. Similarly Apple is collecting more data types than Google according to the research paper.

Please provide evidence of this because Apple's official documentation says otherwise:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203033

They do send nearly WiFi hotspots for crowd sourcing purposes but it is never in conjunction with your local IP address (which is an identifying piece of information).

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#114

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #81
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't mind information about crashes being sent as long as it is very sanitized and easy to disable- similar to how Fedora reports issues. They send only a list of functions on the stack without any of the arguments or data. Example: https://retrace.fedoraproject.org/faf/problems/bthash/?bth=3... Where Google goes too far is sending everything in the name of security or better yet to "serve" the user.

IMEI and serial number make sense, I think too: Apple’s activation lock is a big reason why I bought an iPhone and as far as I can tell, it requires interaction with the server on every boot to work.

I disagree on IMEI. It never changes and is unique.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#115

Post by wmichelin »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

" Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways." -Google This is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doin…

I disagree that telemetry is inherently bad. As product engineers, telemetry is often our only visibility into whether or not a system is functioning healthily. How else can you detect difficult-to-spot bugs in production?

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#116

Post by nojito »

Most of the info Apple sends shouldn't be considered telemetry though.

The hardware info is used to make sure that blacklisted/stolen devices are rendered inoperable.

The other requests are simply due to used apps...it seems the researcher is unclear about many aspects of iOS. i.e. typing a url into Safari kicks off to find links, apps, etc. that will be the logical next step for a "search"

He also doesn't understand the difference between Siri the voice assistant and Siri the platform.

tldr; Google vacuums everything it can...Apple is the exact opposite.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#117

Post by heavyset_go »

AlexandrB wrote: post #24
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

" Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways." -Google This is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doin…

This may be pedantic, but Steam was collecting its 30% long before the App Store opened. Thought maybe that was inspired by Apple's cut of music revenues in the iTunes Store.

I could walk into Best Buy and buy the game I want off the shelf. I have no such option if I want to buy an iOS app from a store or the developers themselves.

Steam also don't engage in anti-competitive behavior and prevent billions of people from using alternative game distribution methods like Apple does.

What we need is real competition in the mobile app distribution market to determine whether or not that 30% is actually fair, efficient and competitive. As it stands, there is no competition in mobile app distribution.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#118

Post by wmichelin »

retube wrote: post #100
grishka wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cars regularly send basic data I'm still terrified by the fact that some cars now apparently have network interfaces for some reason.

Got a courtesy call from BMW the other day to let me know my brake fluid needed changing and would I like an appointment made at my nearest garage? I get that there are privacy concerns, but also that's pretty cool. It also has GPS and will automatically alert BNW if air bags are deployed. Has saved lives.

Ideally some of that data can be aggregated and acted upon locally to the car computer, so that once an arbitrary car manufacturer closes shop, you can still retain the value provided by that telemetry.

Sending it off to their servers and having them manually call you up is nice, but I'd hate for that to suddenly go away because of some business that is outside of your control as a consumer.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#119

Post by mlindner »

wmichelin wrote: post #115
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

" Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways." -Google This is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doin…

I disagree that telemetry is inherently bad. As product engineers, telemetry is often our only visibility into whether or not a system is functioning healthily. How else can you detect difficult-to-spot bugs in production?

Once upon a time fixing bugs in production didn't happen because the product got all the bugs out before production. If it had bugs in production, the product failed.

Re: Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

#120

Post by wmichelin »

swiley wrote: post #53
teraflop wrote: post #25

"20X more telemetry", in terms of data usage, is a pretty meaningless statistic on its own (unless it's large enough to affect your mobile data cap or something). For instance, I would consider it a much bigger privacy violation for my phone to transmit my exact location every hour than my current CPU usage every 10 seconds.

Sending telemetry can get expensive: in situations where bandwidth/throughput is restricted people often get picky about giving PCs with Windows installed internet access because of this. It can be bad even in normal situations: My girlfriend's laptop has so much broken telemetry crap between Microsoft and HP that her applications actually get pushed into swap (or whatever it's called on Windows.)

Sending telemetry _poorly_ can get expensive. A good client can aggregate, even compress locally, and publish telemetry in batches. Let's not rule out telemetry entirely because of bad implementations.

I'd say the moral of the story here is that Microsoft and HP just write shitty software.

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