Who owns your shiny new Pixel 9 phone? You can’t say no to Google’s surveillance
Who owns your shiny new Pixel 9 phone? You can’t say no to Google’s surveillance
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...
GrapheneOS
Do they have passkeys yet
Edit: passkeys support. Last year when I checked they didn't support pass keys yet.
Yes, @[email protected] wrote a great article about that: https://oranki.net/posts/2024-07-10-passkeys-on-grapheneos/
Yep, I've got a Pixel 9 Pro and I don't even have a Google account on this thing.
Installing GrapheneOS removes all the Google crap.
What is the advantage over Calyx/Lineage/iode OS on compatible devices? I just don't want Google to have any of my money at all. Buying a privacy solution from them recoups their loss.
It's my understanding that Graphene has security as its main goal, not privacy, though it's also quite private.
I don't know about Calyx or Iode but Lineage doesn't allow for a locked bootloader. This is a massive security hole and without security, sooner or later, your privacy will be violated.
Currently, GrapheneOS on a newer Pixel are the only phones that Celebrite can't breach. Celebrite machines are cheap enough that the border guards and your local cops probably have one. In my country, it's the law that a cop is allowed to examine a phone during a traffic stop.
You can’t say no to Google’s surveillance
Yes you can: https://grapheneos.org/
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.
I don't mean to discredit your opinion, but it is pure speculation and falls in the category of conspiracy theories. There are plenty of compelling arguments, why this is likely completely wrong:
- Google Pixels have less than 1% of the global smartphone market share, in fact, they are currently only sold in
12(the Pixel 9 is sold in 32 countries, my bad, I had an outdated number in mind) countries around the world. Do you really think that Google would spend all the money in research, custom manufacturing, software development and maintenance to extract this tiny bit of data from a relatively small number of users? I'd say more than 90% of Pixel owners use the Stock OS anyways, so it really doesn't matter. And Google has access to all the user data on around 70% of all the smartphones in the world through their rootkits (Google Play services and framework, which are installed as system apps and granted special privileges), which lets them collect far more data than they ever could from Pixel users. - Keeping this a secret would also immensely difficult and require even more resources, making this even less profitable. Employees leave the company all the time, after which they might just leak the story to the press, or the company could get hacked and internal records published on the internet. Since this would also require hardware modifications, it's also likely that it would get discovered when taking apart and analyzing the device. PCB schematics also get leaked all the time, including popular devices like several generations of iPhones and MacBooks.
- Lastly, the image damage would be insane, if this ever got leaked to the public. No one would ever buy any Google devices, if it was proven that they actually contain hardware backdoors that are used to exfiltrate data.
- Google Pixels have less than 1% of the global smartphone market share, in fact, they are currently only sold in
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.
As the saying goes, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean you're wrong.
The answer that will put this question to bed is open source hardware. Thankfully we're close to having viable options, finally.
I know this isn't the topic here, but I really wish these researchers would unroll what all Apple harvests from Apple devices. It's quite a lot as well. Could help pop that "we're so private" myth.
Who truly owns the device is a question that has been answered ever since Android came into being.
Ask yourself: do you have root access to YOUR phone? No you don't: Google does.
It's the so-called "Android security model", which posits that the users are too dumb to take care of themselves, so Google unilaterally decides to administer their phone on their behalf without asking permission.
Which of course has nothing to do with saving the users from their own supposed stupidity and everything to do with controlling other people's private property to exfiltrate and monetize their data.
How this is even legal has been beyond me for 15 years.
Weirdly, Pixels are actually the best Android phones for installing custom ROMs, at least out of the major manufacturers. So for me, there isn't another choice, because I can finance a Pixel, and I can't finance a Fairphone or something.
GrapheneOS is really the furthest away from Google you can get on an Android phone and it's mainly developed for Pixel.
Please read the many write-ups by developers of well regarded privacy and security ROMs, such as grapheneOS and divestOS.
Who detail in great length why root access is a bad idea, and why many apps that require root access, are just poorly developed security nightmares.
That said, I agree that it should be an option, or at least a standardized means of enabling it. As well as all bootloaders should be unlockable. But phones are more personal devices than the PC ever was, and there are good reasons NOT to push for the proliferation of standardized root access.
These writeups never managed to to convince me me that I should not be able to modify any file on my device. If the system is not able to grant this access to me, and me only, while doing it securely, than it's bad operating system, designed without my interests first on mind. I am absolutely sure that granting so-called "root access" can be done securely, as decades of almost-every-other-OS have shown.
Yes. It is the principle, everyone should be informed of the security risks, but not stripped of the root privileges they keep for themselves.
I have GrapheneOS and I know having root is not ideal and I was wondering about https://shizuku.rikka.app/ It looks like a more elegant way to have for some apps higher privileges while preserving security but I'm not sure about it so I'm thinking out loud
do you have root access to YOUR phone?
Yes. On a Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
Ironically, Google Pixels are among the few (US available) brands that still let you fully unlock the BL
Yes. On a Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
Not if you run the stock OS you don't.
My comment was generic. The vast majority of Android users don't unlock their bootloader and install a custom ROM. The people who do that are fringe users.
My point was that when the normal state of affairs is Google controlling YOUR property that YOU paid with YOUR hard-earned, and you have to be technically competent and willing to risk bricking your device to regain control, that's full-blown dystopia right there.
Yep, what radicalized me against Google was all the way back when they had bought Android and rolled out the Play Store for the first time.
I was on my first-ever phone, and yes, it did have rather limited internal storage, but then the Play Store got installed, taking up all the remaining space. I had literally around 500KB of free storage left afterwards, making it impossible to install new apps.
Couldn't uninstall the Play Store, couldn't move it to the SD-card and it didn't even fucking do anything that the Android Market app didn't do. It just took up 40MB more space for no good reason.
What's surprising about their stock ROM having tracking and phoning home? Use Grapheneos.
You still have to trust their black box Titan security chip that's only in Pixels, that they pinky promised to open source but never did.
You will have to inevitably trust someone somewhere for every phone, unfortunately. At least the Titan has been tested in the real world, and it's not like it's phoning home on it's own or anything.
This doesn't seem surprising at all. Isn't that what Google Play Services is for? If you don't want it, custom ROMs are easily installed.
It's so ironic that Pixels are the go to devices for privacy roms these days.
All this shit is probably happening at the hardware level too, with 100 different backdoors you can't remove with your megamind plan of installing a custom rom.
The silicon probably has the ability to live stream all sensor data directly to the NSA using the fanciest ML compression technology lmao.
It’s so ironic that Pixels are the go to devices for privacy roms these days.
It's so ironic it's a show-stopper for me. I'm not paying fucking Google to escape the Google dystopia. Nosiree! That's just too rich for me.
This is why I own a Fairphone running CalyxOS. Yes, I know GrapheneOS is supposedly more secure - I say supposedly because I think 95% of users don't have a threat model that justifies the extra security really. But I don't care: my number one priority is not giving Google a single cent. If it means running a less secure OS, I'm fine with that.
There's no way on God's green Earth I'm buying a Pixel phone to run a deGoogled OS. That's such an insane proposition I don't even know how anybody can twist their brain into believing this is a rational thing to do.
I think some people buy used/refurbished.
Wait for the 9 to hit refurb market, boom. Google phone without paying Google.
That's why I buy my phones used or refurbished. It's also cheaper and more environmentally friendly.
I say supposedly because I think 95% of users don't have a threat model that justifies the extra security really.
Does street cred with my Cybersecurity peers count as a threat model?
I'm definitely one of the users of GrapheneOS that you're talking about. My threat model is "this is fucking cool!"
Also, the grass is always greener on the other side. I want a Fair phone.
Citation needed. I get that it's healthy not to trust anyone, but with the amount of security research that goes into these devices if something like that was happening then we would know about it.
Maybe and maybe not. We need to encourage robust alternatives, unfortunately this requires a ton of capital to develop hardware and reserve fab time and get your devices fabricated instead of a major player like Google or Samsung.
We basically need something in the smartphone space equivalent to the Framework laptop, that can meet the security hardware requirements, allow bootloader unlock/relock and support GrapheneOS and other custom ROMs.
So what phones do you all have?
Pixel 7 Pro with GrapheneOS
pixel 6a with graphene os
Pixel 8a with graphene
not a phone just a literal block of graphene
How can it be a block? I thought graphene was like a one atom thick layer of graphite? If you want to make a block, you need to stack them, making graphite, not graphene.
Pencil with graphite
stone and chisel
Oooga booga
iPhone 16 Pro Max, but Graphene does look dope.
Fairphone 5
Sony Xperia 1 iii -- LineageOS w/microG
pixel 7a with crdroid
I'd say newer Pixels have even more privacy issues than the older ones because of cloud based AI features (ugh when will the bubble finally pop?) and stuff. However the stock OS is bad for privacy in both cases so a custom ROM is a must and afaik installing it on a Pixel is not too hard. Also new Pixels seem to get custom ROMs very quickly so you don't have to wait for months or even years for someone to make one.
The Pixel 9 line had GrapheneOS avaliable a couple of days after launch. That's how fast. You order the phone, and by the time you got it, GrapheneOS was ready to replace Stock Android.
GrapheneOS + buy your phone from a store in-case you're allergic to PETN