Forget Chrome – Google apps start watching your phone, “No Opt Out”.

Google Chrome will be about to change a major change. We are waiting for a global request to say no biscuits within the world's most popular browser – although we have to use a private browser for some of the new protective measures. But while everything that is going on, there is a bad new surprise for Android users who are being followed anyway.

A new study warns that your phone is followed by “cookies, identifiers and other data that Google saves on Android cell phones in silence. This is done by its pre-installed standard apps. The researchers warn that “no consent is sought for the storage of this data, and there is no optout.” They also claim that “this study is the first to throw light on the cookies stored by pre-installed Google apps.”

This tracking begins as soon as you start with your phone, even if you do not open the apps yourself, and the claim that there is no opt -outs will be related to the direction to Chromes tracking cookies. The standard apps in question include Google's Play Store and Play services, which is in good time given the supervision of the Safetycore photo -Scan -app, which has been “secretly installed” on almost all Android phones in the past few months. The problem here is the same – transparency.

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The new study by Trinity College Dublin calls cookies that count advertising views and clicks. The team says: “No consent is obtained or met for the storage of these cookies and other data, the purposes are not specified and there is no distance from this data storage. Most of this data are also saved when the device is idle after a factory reset and that the user has never been opened Google apps, ie they are not determined as an answer to services that have been expressly requested by the user. “

I turned to Google about your comments on the study and it is important not to overtake these results. For years I have warned that our phones are designed in such a way that they follow almost everything we do and we have to change the settings to add a modic of privacy. The problem here is awareness. There is also a question of how we limit the persecution of the operating system itself and its core services, not only from third -party apps.

The professor of the university, Doug Leith, told Irish Tech News The fact that we all know that our consent is needed before a website saves cookies when filling cookies, but that “cookies stored by apps have received far less attention than web cookies, sometimes because they are more difficult to recognize, and a closer look at them is long overdue.”

This report is made just a few days after Google's controversial decision to enable the fingerprint of devices again after the practice was defeated in 2019. At this point, Google said that “developers have found paths to use tiny information that vary between users, e.g. In contrast to cookies, users cannot delete their fingerprint and therefore cannot control how their information is collected. We think that this user selection undermines and is wrong. “

It is difficult to see this with the lack of control, which is much different – certainly it must be equally wrong. The return of Google to fingerprint was justified based on new technologies “data protection authorities”, which give us more optionality, which our phones can and what cannot. It is important that of course we know what to restrict.

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This is not the first time that Trinity and Leith report Google's data practices. In 2022, she warned that “data sent to Google by the Google News and Google Dialers apps to Google [tells] Google When message/ telephone calls are made/ receive … The data sent by Google Dialers contain the call time and duration, so that the linking of the two cell phones can be linked again to a telephone call. Telephone numbers are also sent to Google. “

And in 2021 the team examined: “The telemetry traffic sent by modern iOS and Android devices to Apple and Google Server and found that Google collects about 20 -more telemetry data from Android devices than Apple from iOS.” Somewhat alarming, as reported by The data record At this point in time “transferred via the telemetry of iOS and Google Android, although the user expressly stopped this from it [option]. “

According to Leith, this latest research is a “wake-up call” for data inspectorate to properly protect users of Android telephones. “Google Play Services and Google Play Store are pre-installed on almost every Android phone. This study shows that you tacitly store advertising and other tracking cookies and data on people's phone calls. Google is not looking for approval for this, and there is no way to block these cookies. “