What's the point?

rant ? i really hope you see how condescending , to say the least, your posts are, before throwing with stones in me.
but please forgive me, didn’t know you are so sensitive.

Because Google bought Android. It’s part of Google’s surveillance system, also called surveillance capitalism, where apps have build in trackers in order to get data from consumers. These data are auctioned within a second, traded by brokers and sold fo advertisers. Mostly combined with your search behaviour, so you get personalised ads.
If you want to know what trackers an app has go to Exodus Privacy Reports. This is a voluntary organisation that does reveal trackers.

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My dear Sailors,
keep your souls and data save,
Google has released the kraken!!

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Dude just use google if you have to, or yandex if you can, how is it so complicated? Yandex got the old googol image search where it will find cropped images, now too sjw for googol, cherish what you have as you will end up losing that too, don’t want to support one side or the other? Just turn your back away and go in a woods, life is so much more than a tracking company from east or west

Jeees folks what’s wrong with you?
Google did not buy Android but developed it.
There is Android without Google available (e.g. /e/). This, however, suffers from similar security concerns as SfOS, mainly due to closed firmware and drivers. Thus, there are other projects such as Replicant , Replicant (operating system) - Wikipedia, which focus on these issues but are ironically based on Android most often :sunglasses::joy:

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They sure did. In 2005.

(Sorry for being pedantic :wink: )

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To insist on facts is not pedantic

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To mention this fact may be. :wink:

Thank you I wasn’t aware of that but always thought Andy Rubin was just some Google developer who invented Android in his spare time!

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In denmark, all banks require the use of an iOS/Android National Identity app to access banks and all government services. This is all encompassing in its scope and design. This is the second and far more pervasive version of the National Identity App.

https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/about-mitid/

We are way past the point where we have a say in this matter. On the other hand, we have online banking that is more secure and residents and citizens can interact with the government online.

The app will still send info by using integrated, deeper system services, even without gplayservices, to the web. I don’t have my android phone with me now, but a tcpdump shows proof.
And then, there is still the baseband

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You have the same android settings in SfOS as well (I mentioned that above). It’s probably even more effective to test if these settings work on a Sailfish phone since you can focus on what the Android container does easily…

And, regarding the baseband - this remains the same when installing SfOS, thus attacks through this route are always feasible except for open hardware devices like e.g. tge GTA04.

There’s none which i’m constantly repeating. Hence why i don’t have AD and not just because I’m using unofficial ports

As I wrote, none of the settings or permissions address those built-in trackers. Plus, as @apozaf wrote, even completely turning off Internet access for an app won’t really do much, because sending out those tracking/telemetry data takes place on a lower level, i.e. not by the applicatiobn itself but through various APIs, SDKs and services that it uses for that purpose - both Google (e.g. GMS, Crashlytics, Google ads, Firebase, and plethora of others) and 3rd party ones.

Do you have a proof of concept or can you cite trustworthy sources?
Thank you!

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As I wrote already thrice, confirming that such tracking/telemetry activities are massively present in lots of Android apps is as simple as downloading APK Editor Studio or similar tool, opening in it an APK of your interest and SEEING YOURSELF what’s defined in its AndroidManifest.xml file.

So why don’t you just do it if you need a proof. And then check yourself if there’s any setting or permission you’re talking about that really covers such activity and is able to block it. This way you’ll have your very own proof. Rather than just repeating like a mantra that “there are settings for that” without ever giving any factual information about that.

I’ve got my own experiences with many such apps and I said what I know. If you don’t believe it, then look up relevant information yourself. I am definitely not going to spend time on convincing you or hunting for sources that you may or may not consider “trustworthy enough”.

That you believe that such nasty activities of Android apps can be blocked with a simple per-app Android setting is actually a problem of your privacy and not mine.

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No doubt that some/most Android apps have loads of trackers implemented by SDKs and toolkits/librarys etc…
However, I’m still missing the proof that those are still able to communicate with their servers even when the app haven’t been granted internet access rights - and this is what you claim.

There’s a fun Android word game I used to play. It was really noticeable that sometimes it used to run fast and other times it slowed to a crawl - as did other apps as well when it was loaded, especially web browsers and the like. With the phone on airplane mode (on a plane!) it ran super fast and that got me thinking.

Sure enough, when it was connected to the network there was loads of traffic. One of the app stores, it may be Aurora, tells you how many trackers are in the app. This one had over twenty in it.

I eventually deleted the app, but not until I had beaten my wife’s score (well, you’ve got to be a bit competitive! ). Revoking network access permission for the app in the meantime restored its speed and that of the phone in general. The network traffic also went down substantially with the bonus that the app ran without displaying a new personalised advert every time I guessed a word right.

Anecdotal I know, but it does tend to suggest that trackers in an Android app do not have network access to their servers when the app has no permission for network connectivity.

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Those are all external APIs (Google Mobile Services aka GMS, Firebase, Crashlytics, Google Ads API, Facebook Ads API, and so on) handling those tracking/telemetry tasks, not the application itself, and so it is those external APIs what handles sending out that data, not the application itself. The application merely invokes those APIs’ own services handling all that stuff. Which you can check by examining any such application’s AndroidManifest.xml file, like suggested. And if you don’t want to do it, then I’m sorry but I feel absolutely no need to prove to you what you can easily check yourself if it is of your interest.

What an incomprehensible thing it is not to be able to edit own posts in this thread. I had to create a new account just to add a few more words. Anyway…

Just to clarify, the way it usually works is that an app invokes some tracking API (let’s say some tracking API of Google Mobile Services) and passes some data to THAT SERVICE. Then it is THAT SERVICE (be it GMS, Firebase, Google Ads API or Facebook Ads API, Amazon or dozens of others) and usually NOT the app itself, what sends the data through the Internet to the destination server. So blocking such app’s Internet access can’t do much, because it’s NOT the app what sends the tracking data over the Internet. It only passes the data LOCALLY to another service on the phone, and it is that service what then forwards it accross the Internet.

Also see e.g. the following article:

and note paragraphs like e.g. these ones:

You can’t imagine how you’re being tracked. The data is worrying. Privacy firm AppCensus pointed out in a research last year that most popular apps for Android phones have trackers built into the code. This is also referred to as SDK or software development kit. They say the most popular SDKs for analytics and advertising are Google Mobile services (found 93% of apps tested), Firebase (83%), Facebook (62%) and Google Ads (55%). When an app sends out data from your phone without your permission, it is communicating with a recipient of that data. The research also suggests among all the third-party recipient platforms, the most popular deliverers of fresh data from unsuspecting users are Google (68%) and Facebook (45%).

Android does not have a tracking-prevention feature. The only trusted app we can recommend is DuckDuckGo. If you find apps on Google Play Store that claim to prevent apps from tracking you, take it with a pinch of salt

When Apple rolled out its App Tracking Transparency controls with iOS for iPhones back in April, Facebook, now Meta, was the most vocal critic of the move. An advertising technology company Lotame released a report last month that indicates tech platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Snap lost as much as $10 billion in the two quarters since iPhone users got the controls with iOS 14.5 in April. Apple’s idea is simple - give users a clear choice of whether they wish to allow apps installed on their iPhones to track their usage across other apps and websites to eventually serve targeted advertising.

Android phones don’t have anything similar just yet, which leaves millions of users’ data free for tracking by apps that seek to collect every bit of data to create your detailed profile.


Well, that’s it from me regarding this thing. If it interests you, please lookup further details yourself.

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