This section describes one other malicious characteristic of mobile phones, location tracking which is caused by the underlying radio system rather than by the specific software in them. The authorities in Venice track the movements of all tourists using their portable phones. The article says that at present the system is configured to report only aggregated information. But that could be changed. What will that system do 10 years from now?
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What will a similar system in another country do? Those are the questions this raises. The phone network tracks the movements of each phone. This is inherent in the design of the phone network: as long as the phone is in communication with the network, there is no way to stop the network from recording its location.
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Many countries including the US and the EU require the network to store all these location data for months or years. Many popular mobile games include a random-reward system called gacha which is especially effective on children. One variant of gacha was declared illegal in Japan in , but the other variants are still luring players into compulsively spending inordinate amounts of money on virtual toys. Almost every phone's communication processor has a universal back door which is often used to make a phone transmit all conversations it hears.
The back door may take the form of bugs that have gone 20 years unfixed. The choice to leave the security holes in place is morally equivalent to writing a back door. In most phones, the modem processor controls the microphone. In most phones it has the power to rewrite the software for the main processor too. A few phone models are specially designed so that the modem processor does not control the microphone, and so that it can't change the software in the main processor. They still have the back door, but at least it is unable to turn the phone unto a listening device. The universal back door is apparently also used to make phones transmit even when they are turned off.
This means their movements are tracked, and may also make the listening feature work. Android phones subsidized by the US government come with preinstalled adware and a back door for forcing installation of apps. The adware is in a modified version of an essential system configuration app. The back door is a surreptitious addition to a program whose stated purpose is to be a universal back door for firmware.
All this is in addition to the malware of Android itself. A very popular app found in the Google Play store contained a module that was designed to secretly install malware on the user's computer. The app developers regularly used it to make the computer download and execute any code they wanted. This is a concrete example of what users are exposed to when they run nonfree apps. They can never be completely sure that a nonfree app is safe.
Xiaomi phones come with a universal back door in the application processor, for Xiaomi's use.
This is separate from the universal back door in the modem processor that the local phone company can use. A Chinese version of Android has a universal back door. Nearly all models of mobile phones have a universal back door in the modem chip. So why did Coolpad bother to introduce another? Because this one is controlled by Coolpad.
Samsung Galaxy devices running proprietary Android versions come with a back door that provides remote access to the files stored on the device. Many Android apps fool their users by asking them to decide what permissions to give the program, and then bypassing these permissions. The Android system is supposed to prevent data leaks by running apps in isolated sandboxes, but developers have found ways to access the data by other means, and there is nothing the user can do to stop them from doing so, since both the system and the apps are nonfree.
This is one of the methods that Netflix uses to enforce the geolocation restrictions dictated by the movie studios.
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We mention them to refute the supposition that prestigious proprietary software doesn't have grave bugs. Out of 21 gratis Android antivirus apps that were tested by security researchers, eight failed to detect a test virus.
All of them asked for dangerous permissions or contained advertising trackers, with seven being more risky than the average of the most popular Android apps. Siri, Alexa, and all the other voice-control systems can be hijacked by programs that play commands in ultrasound that humans can't hear.
Some Samsung phones randomly send photos to people in the owner's contact list. Many Android devices can be hijacked through their Wi-Fi chips because of a bug in Broadcom's non-free firmware. Since the spyware sniffs signals, it bypasses encryption. The mobile apps for communicating with a smart but foolish car have very bad security.
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This is in addition to the fact that the car contains a cellular modem that tells big brother all the time where it is. If you own such a car, it would be wise to disconnect the modem so as to turn off the tracking. Samsung phones have a security hole that allows an SMS message to install ransomware. The developers say that it wasn't intended as a back door, and that may well be true. But that leaves the crucial question of whether it functions as one.
Because the program is nonfree, we cannot check by studying it. They can be recovered in various ways. A half-blind security critique of a tracking app: it found that blatant flaws allowed anyone to snoop on a user's personal data. The critique fails entirely to express concern that the app sends the personal data to a server, where the developer gets it all.
A bug in a proprietary ASN. Many proprietary payment apps transmit personal data in an insecure way. However, the worse aspect of these apps is that payment is not anonymous. Many smartphone apps use insecure authentication methods when storing your personal data on remote servers. This leaves personal information like email addresses, passwords, and health information vulnerable. Because many of these apps are proprietary it makes it hard to impossible to know which apps are at risk. That developer seems to be conscientious about protecting personal data from third parties in general, but it can't protect that data from the state.
Quite the contrary: confiding your data to someone else's server, if not first encrypted by you with free software, undermines your rights. The insecurity of WhatsApp makes eavesdropping a snap. While there is not much detail here, it seems that this does not operate via the universal back door that we know nearly all portable phones have. It may involve exploiting various bugs. There are lots of bugs in the phones' radio software. This section gives examples of mobile apps harassing or annoying the user, or causing trouble for the user.
Samsung phones come preloaded with a version of the Facebook app that can't be deleted. Facebook claims this is a stub which doesn't do anything, but we have to take their word for it, and there is the permanent risk that the app will be activated by an automatic update. Preloading crapware along with a nonfree operating system is common practice, but by making the crapware undeletable, Facebook and Samsung among others are going one step further in their hijacking of users' devices.
It spreads distrust for contraception. A new app published by Google lets banks and creditors deactivate people's Android devices if they fail to make payments. If someone's device gets deactivated, it will be limited to basic functionality, such as emergency calling and access to settings. Samsung is forcing its smartphone users in Hong Kong and Macau to use a public DNS in Mainland China , using software update released in September , which causes many unease and privacy concerns.
Furthermore, the user interface of most of them was designed to make uninstallation difficult. Users should of course uninstall these dangerous apps if they haven't yet, but they should also stay away from nonfree apps in general. All nonfree apps carry a potential risk because there is no easy way of knowing what they really do.
Apple and Samsung deliberately degrade the performance of older phones to force users to buy their newer phones. See above for the general universal back door in essentially all mobile phones, which permits converting them into full-time listening devices.
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Many cr…apps, developed by various companies for various organizations, do location tracking unknown to those companies and those organizations. It's actually some widely used libraries that do the tracking. What's unusual here is that proprietary software developer A tricks proprietary software developers B1 … B50 into making platforms for A to mistreat the end user.
Baidu apps were caught collecting sensitive personal data that can be used for lifetime tracking of users, and putting them in danger. More than 1. Data collected by Baidu may be handed over to the Chinese government, possibly putting Chinese people in danger. Most apps are malware, but Trump's campaign app, like Modi's campaign app, is especially nasty malware, helping companies snoop on users as well as snooping on them itself. The article says that Biden's app has a less manipulative overall approach, but that does not tell us whether it has functionalities we consider malicious, such as sending data the user has not explicitly asked to send.
Xiaomi phones report many actions the user takes : starting an app, looking at a folder, visiting a website, listening to a song. They send device identifying information too. Other nonfree programs snoop too. For instance, Spotify and other streaming dis-services make a dossier about each user, and they make users identify themselves to pay. Out, out, damned Spotify! Forbes exonerates the same wrongs when the culprits are not Chinese, but we condemn this no matter who does it.
The Alipay Health Code app estimates whether the user has Covid and tells the cops directly. Any nonfree program could be doing this, and that is a good reason to use free software instead. Many employers demand to do this.