6 private links
Google is disregarding the privacy settings of millions of Android phones.
Your location companion
A simple way to block access to the internet per app - M66B/NetGuard
Bromite is Chromium plus ad blocking and enhanced privacy; take back your browser
Android is one of Google’s most important tools for collecting data on users. This guide will help you improve your privacy on Android devices.
New study reveals scary, sneaky tactics
Facebook routinely tracks users, non-users and logged-out users outside its platform through Facebook Business Tools. App developers share data with Facebook through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK), a set of software development tools that help developers build apps for a specific operating system. Using the free and open source software tool called "mitmproxy", an interactive HTTPS proxy, Privacy International has analyzed the data that 34 apps on Android, each with an install base from 10 to 500 million, transmit to Facebook through the Facebook SDK.
Objectives To investigate whether and how user data are shared by top rated medicines related mobile applications (apps) and to characterise privacy risks to app users, both clinicians and consumers.
Design Traffic, content, and network analysis.
Setting Top rated medicines related apps for the Android mobile platform available in the Medical store category of Google Play in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Australia.
Participants 24 of 821 apps identified by an app store crawling program. Included apps pertained to medicines information, dispensing, administration, prescribing, or use, and were interactive.
Interventions Laboratory based traffic analysis of each app downloaded onto a smartphone, simulating real world use with four dummy scripts. The app’s baseline traffic related to 28 different types of user data was observed. To identify privacy leaks, one source of user data was modified and deviations in the resulting traffic observed.
Main outcome measures Identities and characterisation of entities directly receiving user data from sampled apps. Secondary content analysis of company websites and privacy policies identified data recipients’ main activities; network analysis characterised their data sharing relations.
Results 19/24 (79%) of sampled apps shared user data. 55 unique entities, owned by 46 parent companies, received or processed app user data, including developers and parent companies (first parties) and service providers (third parties). 18 (33%) provided infrastructure related services such as cloud services. 37 (67%) provided services related to the collection and analysis of user data, including analytics or advertising, suggesting heightened privacy risks. Network analysis revealed that first and third parties received a median of 3 (interquartile range 1-6, range 1-24) unique transmissions of user data. Third parties advertised the ability to share user data with 216 “fourth parties”; within this network (n=237), entities had access to a median of 3 (interquartile range 1-11, range 1-140) unique transmissions of user data. Several companies occupied central positions within the network with the ability to aggregate and re-identify user data.
Conclusions Sharing of user data is routine, yet far from transparent. Clinicians should be conscious of privacy risks in their own use of apps and, when recommending apps, explain the potential for loss of privacy as part of informed consent. Privacy regulation should emphasise the accountabilities of those who control and process user data. Developers should disclose all data sharing practices and allow users to choose precisely what data are shared and with whom.
A new start-up company called eelo wants to provide you with an alternative version of Android. What makes this different than the version of the mobile OS that you are familiar with is that this version is de-Google-ized. The goal is to allow users to have more privacy than they currently do with the Google Play Services version of the open source OS...
An idle Android smartphone sends user data back to Google servers nearly ten times more frequently as an Apple device sends data back to Apple servers.
Idle Android devices typically send data ten times more often to Google than iOS devices do to Apple's servers, according to new research shared...