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Android Privacy Report

The privacy of mobile apps has been extensively studied, but much less attention has been paid to the privacy of the mobile OS itself. A mobile OS may communicate with servers to check for updates, send telemetry and so on. We undertake an in-depth analysis of the data sent by six variants of the Android OS, namely those developed by Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Realme, LineageOS and /e/OS. We find that even when minimally configured and the handset is idle these vendor-customized Android variants transmit substantial amounts of information to the OS developer and also to third-parties (Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook etc) that have pre-installed system apps. While occasional communication with OS servers is to be expected, the observed data transmission goes well beyond this and raises a number of privacy concerns. There is no opt out from this data collection.

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