Smartphones share our data every four and a half minutes, says study | Hacker News Reader

Smartphones share our data every four and a half minutes, says study

irishtimes.com

30 pointsnwotnagrom9 comments

As long as Apple has the encryption keys they should not but trusted, but Apple and Google are a smidge different

> Google handsets collected “a notably larger volume of handset data than Apple” with 1MB of data being sent from idle Google Pixel handsets every 12 hours, compared with 52KB sent from the iPhone.

That’s 20x less than Google collects. If I knew it was all encrypted on device with keys only I own, I’d be much happier, but 20x less is better than nothing.

Actually, 'nothing' would be better than 20x less :)

KB of data is a poor indicator of the extent of privacy violation. Maybe Apple are just shipping deltas instead of the full load. Without inspection we have no idea.

> KB of data is a poor indicator of the extent of privacy violation.

Agreed, but this article seemed to primarily focus on how much data is sent while the phone is idle, so I'm addressing the article.

> Maybe Apple are just shipping deltas instead of the full load.

I highly doubt that Apple figured out all it needs is the delta, while Google are morons who don't know that's all they need. Granted "KB of data is a poor indicator of the extent of privacy violation", but it isn't a useless one.

This research is great to see how we are being constantly followed and profiled by Google and Apple. We need more privacy respecting options for mobile phones, such as /e/ OS mentioned in the research. It should be easy to use for non-technical users, and guard privacy by default. I believe e foundation does a good job in providing a user friendly and private android.

I've been using /e/OS for one year now, and it's awesome how actually easy it is to have a Google-free and normal "digital life"

Some explaination here? https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/14/google_android_data_a...

The original study https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf. They had to jailbreak the iPhone for patching several libraries to circumvent certificate pinning.

Shouldn’t the link be changed from Irishtimes to the pdf?

Meanwhile my Xiaomi phone is constantly sending data when on wifi (by looking at the arrows in the wifi icon).

I'm never buying this crap again.

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