Google’s latest flagship smartphone raises concerns about user privacy and security. It frequently transmits private user data to the tech giant before any app is installed. Moreover, the Cybernews research team has discovered that it potentially has remote management capabilities without user awareness or approval.
Cybernews researchers analyzed the new Pixel 9 Pro XL smartphone’s web traffic, focusing on what a new smartphone sends to Google.
“Every 15 minutes, Google Pixel 9 Pro XL sends a data packet to Google. The device shares location, email address, phone number, network status, and other telemetry. Even more concerning, the phone periodically attempts to download and run new code, potentially opening up security risks,” said Aras Nazarovas, a security researcher at Cybernews…
… “The amount of data transmitted and the potential for remote management casts doubt on who truly owns the device. Users may have paid for it, but the deep integration of surveillance systems in the ecosystem may leave users vulnerable to privacy violations,” Nazarovas said…
Who truly owns the device is a question that has been answered ever since Android came into being.
Ask yourself: do you have root access to YOUR phone? No you don’t: Google does.
It’s the so-called “Android security model”, which posits that the users are too dumb to take care of themselves, so Google unilaterally decides to administer their phone on their behalf without asking permission.
Which of course has nothing to do with saving the users from their own supposed stupidity and everything to do with controlling other people’s private property to exfiltrate and monetize their data.
How this is even legal has been beyond me for 15 years.
And this is different from Apple. Right? Right?
Yep, what radicalized me against Google was all the way back when they had bought Android and rolled out the Play Store for the first time.
I was on my first-ever phone, and yes, it did have rather limited internal storage, but then the Play Store got installed, taking up all the remaining space. I had literally around 500KB of free storage left afterwards, making it impossible to install new apps.
Couldn’t uninstall the Play Store, couldn’t move it to the SD-card and it didn’t even fucking do anything that the Android Market app didn’t do. It just took up 40MB more space for no good reason.