In “Google Data Collection,” Douglas C. Schmidt, Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, catalogs how much data Google is collecting about consumers and their most personal habits across all of its products and how that data is being tied together.
The key findings include:
A dormant, stationary Android phone (with the Chrome browser active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35 percent of all the data samples sent to Google.
For comparison’s sake, a similar experiment found that on an iOS device with Safari but not Chrome, Google could not collect any appreciable data unless a user was interacting with the device. Moreover, an idle Android phone running the Chrome browser sends back to Google nearly fifty times as many data requests per hour as an idle iOS phone running Safari.
An idle Android device communicates with Google nearly 10 times more frequently as an Apple device communicates with Apple servers. These results highlighted the fact that Android and Chrome platforms are critical vehicles for Google’s data collection. Again, these experiments were done on stationary phones with no user interactions. If you actually use your phone the information collection increases with Google.
Google has the ability to associate anonymous data collected through passive means with the personal information of the user. Google makes this association largely through advertising technologies, many of which Google controls. Advertising identifiers—which are purportedly “user anonymous” and collect activity data on apps and third-party webpage visits—can get associated with a user’s real Google identity through passing of device-level identification information to Google servers by an Android device.
Likewise, the DoubleClick cookie ID—which tracks a user’s activity on the third-party webpages—is another purportedly “user anonymous” identifier that Google can associate to a user’s Google account. It works when a user accesses a Google application in the same browser in which a third-party webpage was accessed previously.
A major part of Google’s data collection occurs while a user is not directly engaged with any of its products. The magnitude of such collection is significant, especially on Android mobile devices, arguably the most popular personal accessory now carried 24/7 by more than 2 billion people.
Now where are you from? You look far too young to know about all of this…
A lot of this could be stopped and avoided by switching to another browser disabling chrome (if possible) or install a firewall to even block a lot more (background) traffic.
I think the majority of Android users don’t put much priority on this data leech issue by Google and 3rd party apps. They think a state-of-the-art Android version solves most security problems.
Despite of all this Edward Snowden fuss many users are still not sensitive enough. I believe Whatsapp is the first app being installed before any other on the majority of (new) Android devices.
About Google data collection, my parents taught me that
Android solves a lot of security problems, to be fair. Its just a privacy hog for Google and potentially for the US government 3 letter organisations plus you lose some control. But the lack of having root is a plus for many users akin to how capability-based security is a plus for users but hard to implement because they’ll just click on “yes” the whole time. Symbian was a capability-based OS from the ground up, btw.
I use Firefox instead of Chrome on my mobile phone (and I am trying to switch away from Chrome on my desktops). Its great, ever since Quantum especially, however all these Electron apps and apps on phone still use a headless embedded version of… Chrome. So from a security PoV you got an attack surface of two browser engines.
Btw, for a headless version of Firefox for the terminal, check out https://brow.sh
“Welcome to the European observatory on Algorithmic Sovereignty. This is a collective place of documentation gathering research, developments, events and projects related to the topic. […]” The first summit was yesterday.
Yes, but some information is false already such as the release date which is not 2017 but 2015.
“Due to the fact that we lack a lot of company specific data such as Fairphone’s CO2 footprint.”
I do believe this is rather a matter of not having properly investigated on these missing pieces of information. Fairphone does offer quite a lot of valuable information on their product (and business goals/actions) (often much more than conventional manufacturers do, so I am a bit surprised that there is much more of such data in the database from the others).
Even Greenpeace found more information, how did they do it? I think the lack is not on the FP side.
While you are right, of course, one has to acknowledge, that this is a really heavy task to start with, not to mention keeping it up-to-date. Much more so, as they seem to be a young enthusiastic team doing it in their spare time (while studying?).
Maybe this community could help them updating their infos.
Yes, I fully agree with your point. Nevertheless I tend to say it should be an even more easy task to gather information about Fairphone than about most other smartphones/companies out there.
Already having a database with data of many other phones building up a score gets me to wonder how come specifically some is missing for FP.
Maybe they were on the FP HP but did not use the search function too extensively.
Yes, of course. I have sent a message to the team with more information
on where to find more details and how easy it is to gather them for the FP2.
Nice idea, but I could not read anything about a non-fixed installed (replaceable) accumulator.
If so it already would be out of the race for me, even if it could fly or dive.
Planet Computers (who made the Gemini PDA) are planning to make a Nokia Communicator clone. Sadly not a fair project, nor modular, but it is a small mobile device with a physical keyboard (and some decent features such as USB-C, NFC, decent camera, …) running Android/Debian/Sailfish out of the box.
Unfortunately, the Bloomberg article focuses only on the financial benefits and less reliance on DR Congo (instead of improving working conditions and added value there).
