Are Qualcomm Chips Snooping on You? No, Not Quite

upstart writes:

Snapdragon giant and others insist alleged data gathering is overblown:

Analysis Cellphones using Qualcomm chipsets may transmit data sometimes classified as personal information, specifically IP addresses, back to Qualcomm. But where such transmission is occurring, it's not secret and it has been going on for years.

That doesn't mean, however, there's no privacy risk in Qualcomm-based phones or in devices with rival chip sets for individuals like journalists or human rights advocates with sophisticated adversaries. Such scenarios, however, are unusual and not much of a worry for most mobile phone users.

Recently, hardware security firm Nitrokey published an advisory claiming that "smartphones with Qualcomm chips secretly send personal data to Qualcomm" and do so "without user consent, unencrypted, and even when using a Google-free Android distribution."

[...] "Qualcomm's proprietary firmware is not only downloading some files to our phone to help establish the GPS location faster, but also uploads our personal data, such as the devices' unique ID, our country code (Germany in this case), our cellphone operator code (allowing identification of country and mobile operator), our operating system and version and a list of software on the device," as Nitrokey put it, arguing this supplied metadata amounts to a unique per-person signature that harms privacy and occurs even when GPS is turned off.

A Qualcomm spokesperson disputed the research. "The article is riddled with inaccuracies and appears to be motivated by the author's desire to sell his product," a company spokesperson told The Register in an email. "Qualcomm only collects personal information when permitted by applicable law."

[...] Martijn Braam, a core developer for Alpine-Linux-based postmarketOS, has published a similarly scathing dismissal of the research as empty marketing. He noted the Qualcomm-initiated HTTP communication does not contain any private data. "It's just downloading a GPS almanac from Qualcomm for A-GPS [assisted GPS]," he observed.

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