Google Play (Android App Store) does not work at all unless you enable Equifax
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I'm using ICS. Go and disable the certificates yourself and see if you can confirm it.
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Equifax Secure CA is the root CA for the certificate chain.
The intermediate CA (Google Internet Authority) issues the certificate for the end entity. Its CRL distribution point is http://crl.geotrust.com/crls/secureca.crl. There is no OCSP resource.
The end-entity certificate is wild-carded for a number of Google sites. Its CRL distribution point is http://www.gstatic.com/GoogleInternetAuthority/GoogleInterne.... There is no OCSP resource.
The relying party would validate the end-entity and intermediate CA certificates using CRLs (as no OCSP is available). These requests would be the only "data" sent as part of the certificate validation.
As the root CA is explicitly trusted (since it is present in the trust anchor compilation), it (Equifax Secure CA) is not contacted.
Explicitly removing trust for arbitrary root CAs (which can be prudent) will of course remove trust for end-entity certificates traceable to those CAs. Thus, if one removes trust for Equifax Secure Certificate Authority, one will no longer trust certificates issued by Google Internet Authority, such as the one used by https://play.google.com/store.
Trust via contemporary CA compilations and relying party PKI implementations is quite coarse. One essentially trusts all all CAs and subordinate certificates for a variety of purposes. Implementations vary in precision (or even presence) of revocation and constraint checking.
"Equifax Inc. (EFX), EBay Inc.'s (EBAY) PayPal and Intuit Inc. (INTU) have beguntrials to see whether social posts can help prove identities,and, in some cases, detect whether customers are lying abouttheir finances." http://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-posts-help-credit-bur...
Actually I remember blogging about this years ago, back when Myspace was at its peak. So it's not news. I'm just wondering if Google has revealed what data it reports to Equifax, if any. And if that's the case, I think the next question is: What sort of app activity will help improve your credit?
So I was just watching a movie at home and this was my process:
1. Enable creepy certificate. 2. Try Play. 3. Play doesn't work? Re-disable creepy certificate. Go to #1 (Try next creepy certificate.)
That's not to say Equifax is the ONLY certificate you MUST have to use Play. But it appears it's at least ONE of the required certificates. If I was really bored and had several hours to blow I suppose I could figure out which certificates are mandatory.
The annoying thing is, Google makes you tick a checkbox, then scroll, then Enable, then Confirm (four steps) for each certificate. So it's very time-consuming. Maybe easier to toy with the certificates if you have root access to your phone, which I haven't bothered to do yet.
Not only that
a) It's mandatory, not something you can turn off. Unless you want no apps on your phone.
b) There is no error message saying "Could not connect to Equifax." It just asks if you want to "Retry" starting the app.
To my knowledge, verifying the server certificate from a local CA store does not send data to the CA itself, do you have any reason to think otherwise?