"Study Reveals Scale of Data-Sharing from Android Mobile Phones"

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin and the University of Edinburgh analyzed six variants of the Android OS developed by Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, /e/OS, Realme, and LineageOS to gain further insight into data collection and sharing by Android mobile phones. With the exception of /e/OS, these vendor-customized Android OS variants share significant amounts of information with the OS developer and third parties, including Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook with pre-installed system apps. The study highlighted the lack of an opt-out option for this data collection. Although some communication with OS servers is expected, the study points out that the observed data transmission goes beyond this, raising many privacy concerns. The study found that all of the examined handset manufacturers, except /e/OS, collect a list of all the apps installed on a handset, which could be sensitive information as it can reveal a lot about a user, such as their religion, political affiliation, and sexual orientation. Samsung, Xiaomi, Realme, and Google collect long-lived device identifiers and user-resettable advertising identifiers, meaning that when a user resets an advertising identifier, the new identifier value can be re-linked back to the same device, thus weakening the use of user-resettable advertising identifiers. Most of the handsets come with pre-installed third-party system apps from Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook that silently collect data with no opt-out option. This article continues to discuss key findings from the study on the scale of data collection and sharing by Android mobile phones. 

Trinity College Dublin reports "Study Reveals Scale of Data-Sharing from Android Mobile Phones"