Android Phones Still Track You, Even When You Opt Out

upstart writes:

Android Phones Still Track You, Even When You Opt Out:

If you use an Android phone and are (rightfully!) worried about digital privacy, you've probably taken care of the basics already. You've deleted the snoopiest of the snoopy apps, opted out of tracking whenever possible, and taken all of the other precautions the popular how-to privacy guides have told you to. The bad news-and you might want to sit down for this-is that none of those steps are enough to be fully free of trackers.

Or at least, that's the thrust of a new paper from researchers at Trinity College in Dublin who took a look at the data-sharing habits of some popular variants of Android's OS, including those developed by Samsung, Xiaomi, and Huawei. According to the researchers, with little configuration" right out of the box and when left sitting idle, these devices would incessantly ping back device data to the OS's developers and a slew of selected third parties. And what's worse is that there's often no way to opt out of this data-pinging, even if users want to.

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