this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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Who owns your shiny new Pixel 9 phone? You can’t say no to Google’s surveillance (cybernews.com)
submitted 8 months ago by gytrash@feddit.uk to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml
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Google's latest flagship smartphone raises concerns about user privacy and security. It frequently transmits private user data to the tech giant before any app is installed. Moreover, the Cybernews research team has discovered that it potentially has remote management capabilities without user awareness or approval.

Cybernews researchers analyzed the new Pixel 9 Pro XL smartphone’s web traffic, focusing on what a new smartphone sends to Google.

“Every 15 minutes, Google Pixel 9 Pro XL sends a data packet to Google. The device shares location, email address, phone number, network status, and other telemetry. Even more concerning, the phone periodically attempts to download and run new code, potentially opening up security risks,” said Aras Nazarovas, a security researcher at Cybernews...

... “The amount of data transmitted and the potential for remote management casts doubt on who truly owns the device. Users may have paid for it, but the deep integration of surveillance systems in the ecosystem may leave users vulnerable to privacy violations,” Nazarovas said...

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[–] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You can’t say no to Google’s surveillance

Yes you can: https://grapheneos.org/

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

I was just wondering earlier today if Google kept the bootloader open to allow custom OS installation only because they had other hardware on the phone that would send them their information anyways, possibly through covert side channels.

Like they could add listeners for cell signals that pick up data encoded in the lower bits of timestamps attached to packets, which would be very difficult to detect (like I'm having trouble thinking of a way to determine if that's happening even if you knew to look for it).

Or maybe there's a sleeper code that can be sent to "wake up" the phone's secret circuitry and send bulk data when Google decides they want something specific (since encoding in timestamps would be pretty low bandwidth), which would make detection by traffic analysis more difficult, since most of the time it isn't sending anything at all.

This is just speculation, but I've picked up on a pattern of speculating that something is technically possible, assuming there's no way they'd actually be doing that, and later finding out that it was actually underestimating what they were doing.