Do you ever wonder how much the tech companies know about you? Is your data really private?
A research paper published by Professor Douglas Leith of the Trinity College in London, detailed the amount of data that Phone and Messages apps for Android by Google can collect from a user.
Turns out, Google was collecting its users' call logs and text messages without their consent. According to the paper, the blanket policies from Google Play Services disclosed to its users that the company will be collecting data relevant for phone updates or syncing data across devices.
The paper points out the data that Google had been collecting fell out of the purview of what was covered in Google's privacy policies. The messages app for instance, takes your message content and timestamps. It then generates a hash to keep the data anonymous and then sends a part of it to Google's servers.
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While Hashes are difficult to reverse, professor Leith believes that hashes can be undone in case of smaller messages, and some of the message content can be recovered.
"The hash includes a hourly timestamp, so it would involve generating hashes for all combinations of timestamps and target messages and comparing these against the observed hash for a match," said Leith, in a interview with The Register.
"Feasible I think for short messages given modern compute power," he added.
The phone app logs incoming and outgoing calls, while also collecting the time and duration of the calls. These were also tagged with your unique Android phone ID meaning that it would be theoretically possible to track someone by matching the ID with timestamps and call data.
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Google says that its collecting phone data for spam protection and caller ID functionality. The company said that it only collected logs for numbers not in your contact list but this still does not excuse the fact that it gave customers no option to opt-out of this.
Following the release of the paper, Google announced some changes to the way it collects data from these apps. It said that it already anonymised call log data by rounding out the timestamps to the nearest hour. Google announced that the phone app will do this on device starting now.
The Google Messages app will also no longer collect SIM Card ID, data from senders of incoming messages and hashed contents of your messages. The good news is that all of these changes have rolled out starting with Google Phone version 75 and Google Messages version 10.9.
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