A study of data collection by Android devices

> Key findings from the study:

>

> With the exception of e/OS, all of the handset manufacturers examined collect a list of all the apps installed on a handset. This is potentially sensitive information since it can reveal user interests, e.g., a mental health app, a Muslim prayer app, a gay dating app, a Republican news app. There is no opt out from this data collection.

This happens when looking for updates anyway

> The Xiaomi handset sends details of all the app screens viewed by a user to Xiaomi, including when and how long each app is used. This reveals, for example, the timing and duration of phone calls. The effect is akin to the use of cookies to track people’s activity as they move between web pages. This data appears to be sent outside Europe to Singapore.

Can this be "standard" app analytics. Not saying its okay, but this is the norm these days.

> On the Huawei handset the Swiftkey keyboard sends details of app usage over time to Microsoft. This reveals, for example, when a user is writing a text, using the search bar, searching for contacts.

Your custom wordlist is on the cloud with them, so they can see much more than that.

> Samsung, Xiaomi, Realme and Google collect long-lived device identifiers, e.g., the hardware serial number, alongside user-resettable advertising identifiers. This means that when a user resets an advertising identifier the new identifier value can be trivially re-linked back to the same device, potentially undermining the use of user-resettable advertising identifiers.

This is probably a major GDPR issue.

Edit: could also be for guarantee reasons. The big question is if this is ever used for advertising.

> Third-party system apps, e.g., from Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Facebook, are pre-installed on most of the handsets and silently collect data, with no opt out.

This is horrible!! I specifically avoid using any Facebook services and we all know about their shadow profiles for users who don't own a FB account.

(But what kind of data have the apps access to? In theory they are never used and have no privileges?)

> There may exist a data ecosystem where data collected from a handset by different companies is shared/linked. Notably, the privacy focused e/OS variant of Android was observed to transmit essentially no data.

We need more openness here.

People do it as well, they gather tons of statistics on themselves like how many steps they've walked and how many glasses of water they've had and how many hours they've slept, which for the most part is completely non-actionable information and your body is much better at telling you if you are feeling well rested than your spreadsheet is. You get a pretty graph for sure, but it ultimately doesn't say anything you didn't already know.

I guess you could convince yourself this is science, but in science the hypothesis precedes the experiment. If you gather tons of arbitrary data and go digging for correlations, you will find them, but anything interesting you find is most likely going to be spurious relationships and other statistical aberrations.

It's data dredging, not science.