Thank you for your service.

There’s an element of privacy fatalists around here who require no evidence for their claims and will doggedly ignore any evidence to the contrary. While I think zero-trust is a proper approach to security problems, propagandizing the technical aspect with hearsay and falsehood is useless.

Many tolerate it thinking we share a common enemy, but they’re wrong. Ignorance is the enemy, and tolerating it is why the community of privacy advocates is being swallowed by the much much larger community of online conspiracy brokers. Anyway, thank you for not tolerating it and doing your part.

Also you had to indicate this in several places, including a toggle to disclose if there were cameras ANYWHERE on the premises.

Wireless nanny cams might be easy to hide, but their RF activity is easy to detect with free apps. I can’t imagine this was very common, but any amount of abuse is too much.

Agreed, though I might add that a number of manufacturers have been known to dabble in data brokerage as well.

It might sound paranoid, but Android is built around data collection, and in practice it’s just a feeding frenzy. The carrier, the manufacturer, the ad platforms, the advertisers, the app developers, everyone gets pieces of you and none take responsibility for the pieces the others take, since it’s outside the scope of their offering.

The best bet is a clean flash, Lineage or the like, and strictly open source apps. I’d encourage any user who can’t or won’t go through that process to stick to iOS. It’s not perfect but it has the best default privacy protections by a significant margin and the refurb market has many affordable units. Factory Android these days is a privacy nightmare.

Yeah they skipped past some likely questions. I can try to fill in a little.

Apple users are assigned an advertising ID, but the user can reset (not disable IIRC) the ID whenever they want, so it might not be as useful to the carrier for profiling purposes. All that would give them is fragments of profiles that, without other identifiers like phone or email, might be impossible to associate with their customer.

Android users tend to have numerous and more persistent identifiers available for profiling, and manufacturers have been permissive with carrier partners re: daemons, kernel extensions, and custom telecom apps. I think that’s what the article meant was unique to Android. Carrier tracking can just be more deeply embedded in these systems, beyond the obvious bloatware apps and widgets.

Interestingly, Apple sells similar tracking functionality for custom provisioned commercial devices IIRC, complete with the uninstallable apps, enhanced telemetry, etc. So it’s not like they can’t or won’t track users as a paid service, they just have no reason to let carriers do it on their equipment.