Security News > 2021 > October > Android data sharing remains significant, no opt-out available to users

An in-depth analysis of a range of popular Android mobile phones has revealed significant data collection and sharing, including with third parties, with no opt-out available to users.

Prof. Doug Leith at Trinity College Dublin along with Dr Paul Patras and Haoyu Liu at the University of Edinburgh examined the data sent by six variants of the Android OS developed by Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Realme, LineageOS and /e/OS. Vendor-customized Android variants share substantial amounts of data to third parties.

"Prof. Doug Leith, Chair of Computer Systems at the School of Computer Science and Statistics in Trinity College Dublin, said:"I think we have completely missed the massive and ongoing data collection by our phones, for which there is no opt out.

Third-party system apps, e.g., from Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Facebook, are pre-installed on most of the handsets and silently collect data, with no opt out.

There may exist a data ecosystem where data collected from a handset by different companies is shared/linked.

Notably, the privacy focused e/OS variant of Android was observed to transmit essentially no data.

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