A study conducted by a computer science professor at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland found that the user data collected by Android phones is 20 times that of similar iPhones. According to Doug Leith, a researcher and chair of computer systems at the college, both iOS and Android phones are constantly collecting data and sending it back to Apple and Google, respectively. The information mobile phone behavior starts from inserting the SIM card into the smartphone and includes the interaction of hardware and applications.
When the user is not logged in, opts out of data collection in the privacy settings, and the phone is in an idle state, the data collection process may still run. Laisi found that iOS shared information about IMEI, hardware serial number, SIM serial number, phone number, device ID (including UDID and advertising ID), location, telemetry, cookie, local IP address and nearby Wi-Fi Mac address. Android sends similar data, adding the Wi-Fi MAC address of the device, but does not include the location information of the phone, the local IP address and the nearby Wi-Fi Mac address.
The test conditions of Lai Si are to test after the phone is restored to the factory settings, start for the first time, insert or remove the SIM card when the phone is idle, check the settings, enable or disable the location, and the first time when the user logs in to the app store. The test product is a Google Pixel 2 mobile phone running the Android 10 system and an unknown iPhone model running iOS 13.6.1. However, in order to monitor the network connection, the iPhone has been jailbroken.
Leith said the most prominent difference is the amount of information collected. According to his research, Android sent approximately 1MB of data to Google at startup, while iOS sent approximately 42KB of data to Apple. When the phone is idle, Android sends another 1MB of memory every 12 hours, compared to 52KB for iOS. In the US, Google estimates that it will get 1.3TB of data from its (all) users every 12 hours, while Apple will receive 5.8GB of data in the same period.
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Lai Si believes that “currently, there are few options to prevent this data sharing”, that is, users must accept the collected data as long as they use their mobile phones. In response to this result, Google responded that Leith’s method is flawed, and they believe that data collection is the core function of any connected device. The spokesperson questioned the validity of the experiment, pointing out that the experiment could not capture data such as UDP/QUIC traffic. (QUIC is a set of UDP-based transmission protocols launched by Google to ensure reliability while reducing network latency):
We found that the researchers have flaws in the method of measuring the amount of data, and disagree with the paper’s statement that the amount of data shared by Android devices is 20 times more than that of the iPhone. According to our research, these results differ by an order of magnitude, and we shared our concerns about testing methods with researchers before publishing the paper.
This research largely outlines how smartphones work. Hyundai Motor regularly sends basic data about car parts, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work very similarly. The report details these communication methods, and these communications help ensure that the iOS or Android software is up-to-date, services can operate as expected, and features such as phone/security can also operate effectively.
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