Study analyzes pre-installed software on Android devices and its privacy risks for users

ronjor · Mar 20, 2019

March 20, 2019, IMDEA Networks Institute

The study shows, on the one hand, that the permission model on the Android operating system and its apps allow a large number of actors to track and obtain personal user information. At the same time, it reveals that the end user is not aware of these actors in the Android terminals or of the implications that this practice could have on their privacy. Furthermore, the presence of this privileged software in the system makes it difficult to eliminate it if one is not an expert user.
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guest · May 9, 2019

Rampant Android bloatware a privacy and security hellscape
May 9, 2019
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/09/android_bloatware_security/

The apps bundled with many Android phones are presenting threats to security and privacy greater than most users think.

This according to a paper (PDF) from university researchers in the US and Spain who studied the pre-installed software that 214 different vendors included in their Android devices. They found that everyone from the hardware builders to mobile carriers and third-party advertisers were loading products up with risky code.
To study bundled software, the team crowdsourced firmware and traffic information from a field of 2,748 volunteers running 1,742 different models of devices from 130 different countries.

The study, An Analysis of Pre-installed Android Software, was written by Julien Gamba, Mohammed Rashed, Abbas Razaghpanah, Juan Tapiador, and Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez. It is being presented later this month at the 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
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An Analysis of Pre-installed Android Software (PDF - 473 KB): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.02713

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Study analyzes pre-installed software on Android devices and its privacy risks for users

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