Security News > 2020 > January > Google scolded for depriving the poor of privacy, accused of preloading malware on phones for hard-up Americans

On Wednesday, more than 50 advocacy groups accused Google of exploiting poor people by failing to police misbehaving Android apps on cheap phones.

The advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Privacy International, to name a few, published an open letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking him "To take action against exploitative pre-installed software on Android devices."

Their concern is that almost all Android apps installed on devices by Google's Android partners prior to sale do not face the same security scrutiny as Android apps distributed to device users through Google Play.

They want Google to provide a way to uninstall pre-installed apps and related background services permanently, to apply the same security review that Play-submitted apps receive, to support an update mechanism for these apps without a user account, and to actually refuse to certify partner devices if they contain exploitative software.

The app is "a variant of Adups, a China-based company caught collecting user data, creating backdoors for mobile devices and, yes, developing auto-installers," said senior malware intelligence analyst Nathan Collier in a blog post.

News URL

https://go.theregister.co.uk/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/09/google_poor_privacy/