A report has stirred up fears around how Google’s Pixel 9 series “shares” personal data, but it’s clearly not fully accurate, and missing some very important context.
Cybernews this week put out a report which found that Google’s new Pixel 9 series, specifically the Pro, “sends a data packet to Google” every “15 minutes” which contains your ” location, email address, phone number, network status” and more. The report makes this claim by using a “man-in-the-middle” approach to capture the data being sent out by the device.
While that all sounds scary, the report does seem to lack a lot of important context.
The “data packet” being sent from Pixel is not exclusive to Pixel devices. This happens on all Android devices, and it’s not even unique to Android. As the developers of GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused version of Android, explain on Twitter/X, iOS also sends this data to Apple as well, and other Android OEMs may actually send that same data to more places than a Pixel would.
The primary issue in the report is the lack of “explicit consent” in how this data is sent to Google, also claiming that the amount of data “appears excessive” and “doesn’t align with the industry’s best anonymization practices.”
Google, in a statement embedded within the report, further says that the report “misinterprets technical details” and doesn’t explain what the data being sent is used for, adding that this data is needed “for legitimate services on all mobile devices.”
User security and privacy are top priorities for Pixel. You can manage data sharing, app permissions and more during device setup and in your settings. This report lacks crucial context, misinterprets technical details and doesn’t fully explain that data transmissions are needed for legitimate services on all mobile devices regardless of the manufacturer, model or OS, such as software updates, on-demand features and personalized experiences.
Google also pointed to a page where it discloses what data is collected and how it is used.
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