A study of data collection by Android devices

[Posted October 12, 2021 by corbet]

A group of researchers at Trinity College in Dublin has released

the results of a study

into the data collected by a number of Android variants. There are few surprises here, but the picture is still discouraging.

We find that the Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei and Realme Android variants all transmit a substantial volume of data to the OS developer (i.e. Samsung etc) and to third-party parties that have pre-installed system apps (including Google, Microsoft, Heytap, LinkedIn, Facebook). LineageOS sends similar volumes of data to Google as these proprietary Android variants, but we do not observe the LineageOS developers themselves collecting data nor pre-installed system apps other than those of Google. Notably, /e/OS sends no information to Google or other third parties and sends essentially no information to the /e/OS developers.

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