We captured 72 hours of idle Android network packets behind a hardware firewall: 348 outbound requests/hour to Alphabet servers vs GrapheneOS. Raw CSV & blocklist.
27 comments
That’s great, but the sandboxed Google play services are by default set to normal in battery usage. Meaning it’s subject to dooze and other ways to artificially limit its background activity.
You neee to set the battery usage to unrestricted to reliably revive notification.
I wonder what the packet count would have been with unrestricted Google play services.
The data I really care about protecting would fit into a few kilobytes, so knowing the phone sends, for example, a minuscule 2 MB/day, brings me no comfort.
Obviously they send back this data to Google, for legitimate and advertising reasons. For instance, how would they backup apps you have installed if they didn’t know what you installed in the first place.
On grapheneos, it doesn’t have access to this data, but it can still gather a lot of data (just as regular apps on Android). Location (even without location permission), WiFi devices around, Gyroscope so they know if you are standing, driving or else, etc…
Android is rotten to the core.
What makes him disgraced?
tldr he became very political.
Cause the (obviously AI generated) page is fairly ambiguous in this regard. In one section it claims certain pieces of info were sent outright. In others, it refers to them as "Privacy Threat Vector" items. Were they possibly sent or were they actually sent? Why is this left unclear? Why is transmission alone counted as evidence of later misuse? What data is technically necessary to send as part of a protocol?
I'm really quite tired of the run of the mill "privacy minded" folks thinking they're the hot shit because they can launch WireShark, and gawk at packets flying about. Like no, various corporate SNIs appearing in a chatty network log is not evidence for illegal or unethical corporate espionage/surveillance, especially not a clear one. Nor is the network log being chatty any evidence one way or another. Do you really think that surveillence is a more likely explanation for them than just regular enterprise sprawl?
If you're bringing receipts, bring them whole, disclaimers and limitations included. Any analysis that stops before decrypting the traffic is deeply unserious, and only serves to discredit actual research findings & real violations of privacy.
Care to run the same experiment for an iPhone?
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