Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm
1–10 of 346 posts
Re: Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm
#2This kind of restates what was discussed here yesterday. Android's constant leaking of data to Google is hardly any news, but Qualcomm's firmware doing the same in plain text to izatcloud.net is newsworthy. Apparently Apple is doing the same. Someone has a nice geolocation database of practically everyone in the world.
Re: Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm
#3This seems like a really shallow dive into what’s going on, and seems to exist largely to plug their own hardware?
For example, how is the chipset getting “List of the software on the device” unless the chipset is aware of the operating system?
They don’t actually do any packet data analysis to see what it includes as far as I can tell, so other than seeing some packets go through, the rest feels like idle speculation.
Also, why didn’t they try GrapheneOS which is what their own devices use? Surely if the goal is to try and deduce that the chipset is involved, rather than a driver, then that’s the logical place to start?
Re: Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm
#4This kind of restates what was discussed here yesterday. Android's constant leaking of data to Google is hardly any news, but Qualcomm's firmware doing the same in plain text to izatcloud.net is newsworthy. Apparently Apple is doing the same. Someone has a nice geolocation database of practically everyone in the world.
> Apparently Apple is doing the same.
Just curious, where did you find this?
Re: Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm
#5This kind of restates what was discussed here yesterday. Android's constant leaking of data to Google is hardly any news, but Qualcomm's firmware doing the same in plain text to izatcloud.net is newsworthy. Apparently Apple is doing the same. Someone has a nice geolocation database of practically everyone in the world.
> Apparently Apple is doing the same. Just curious, where did you find this?
Everyone operates an AGPS service these days. Without it, you'd have to wait at least 12.5 minutes from a fully cold start (and likely, if you missed a data packet, double or triple that) until the GPS receiver has all the almanac data [1].
Re: Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm
#6This seems like a really shallow dive into what’s going on, and seems to exist largely to plug their own hardware? For example, how is the chipset getting “List of the software on the device” unless the chipset is aware of the operating system? They don’t actually do any packet data analysis to see what it includes as far as I can tell, so other than seeing some packets go through, the rest feels like idle speculatio…
> They don’t actually do any packet data analysis to see what it includes as far as I can tell, so other than seeing some packets go through, the rest feels like idle speculation.
That's enough under GDPR, which is the point of the article. Even though the GDPR requires active informed consent, there are still so many layers openly sharting on that requirement, and no one holds the big players accountable.
Re: Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm
#7This kind of restates what was discussed here yesterday. Android's constant leaking of data to Google is hardly any news, but Qualcomm's firmware doing the same in plain text to izatcloud.net is newsworthy. Apparently Apple is doing the same. Someone has a nice geolocation database of practically everyone in the world.
> Apparently Apple is doing the same. Just curious, where did you find this?
iPhone involves a lot of telemetry which Apple sends it to itself. We don’t know what kind of contract Apple has with Qualcomm but if it involves Apple anonymising and sending the data to Qualcomm for using its chips then it’s likely going to be the same just in a different form. I’m pretty sure Qualcomm would like some kind of telemetry from its partners it sells chips to.
Re: Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm
#8Contrary to mediatek chips who openly send it to China or apple chips who also openly send it to Apple, and of course let's not forget the intel management engine ;)
Re: Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm
#9Interesting research. I have booted up Pixels using Qualcomm chips and have not seen the elusive izaticloud.
The one issue with using GrapheneOS's connectivity check is that you're broadcasting to the network that you're someone of interest. An Android phone connecting to Google isn't great for privacy but it is normal. An Android phone connecting to a GrapheneOS domain isn't.
Re: Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm
#10Contrary to mediatek chips who openly send it to China or apple chips who also openly send it to Apple, and of course let's not forget the intel management engine ;)
MediaTek is not Chinese. You might be thinking of HiSilicon.