A supposed battery-saving feature baked into all versions of Android since 3.1 is apparently gathering and transmitting worryingly precise information as to the respective movements location, movement and behaviors.
Every breath you take, every move you make…well, you know the rest.
Being told we’re being watched by the world’s biggest tech brands every hour of every day is about as surprising as the sunrise. Nevertheless, biggies like Google still seem to be able to come up with new and innovative ways of keeping tabs of where we are and what we’re doing on a scale above and beyond that we’ve come to consider the norm…albeit a rather scary norm.
This time around, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has produced a report suggesting that regardless of whether your Smartphone or tablet PC is asleep or awake, it could still be doing a number on your privacy. In the firing line this time are devices running Android 3.1 Honeycomb and all later builds – all of which feature Preferred Network Offload. Roughly summed up, PNO maintains and transmits a log of 15 recently accessed Wi-Fi networks even when in sleep mode, automatically connected to known networks without powering up as a means by which to safe battery life.
Which is all well and good, but the concern of the EFF is that by keeping this log, the device builds and transmits a terrifyingly detailed and ongoing map of where you’ve been, how long you’ve been there and where you’re going.
“This data is arguably more dangerous than that leaked in previous location data scandals because it clearly denotes in human language places that you’ve spent enough time to use the Wi-Fi,” reads the ensuing report from the EFF.
“Normally eavesdroppers would need to spend some effort extracting this sort of information from the latitude/longitude history typically discussed in location privacy analysis. But even when networks seem less identifiable, there are ways to look them up.”
As for the really bad news, the report primarily singled out the Android devices mentioned above…tens of millions of the things…but the creepy snooping isn’t only limited to Google’s mobile OS.
“Many laptops are affected, including all OS X laptops and many Windows 7 laptops,” warned the EFF.
“Desktop OSes will need to be fixed, but because our laptops are not usually awake and scanning for networks as we walk around, locational history extraction from them requires considerably more luck or targeting.”
Big Brother is watching you…