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kyub@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

If you use Google’s Play Services and/or other Google proprietary apps and services (they are standard on all commercial Android phones), then your battery will be drained slightly more due to it having spyware (euphemism: “telemetry”) integrated. The Google Play services app, for example, does transmit at the minimum this data roughly every 20 minutes to Google:

Phone #
SIM Card #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your  logged in Google account
IP address

And that is just if you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount they are always gathering from every Android user, no matter what you selected. To make matters worse, the Google Play services is typically installed as a “system critical app” which means you as the owner of the phone can’t even uninstall it or reduce some of its permissions.

(If you have an iPhone instead, and think you’re safe from this, no you aren’t. Apple also collects a minimum amount of telemetry data which you cannot ever completely disable, it just does it slightly less frequently (IIRC, it was like every hour or so, compared to Google’s every 20min at the minimum).

And then there’s also the advertisement ID, a world-wide unique identifier set in all commercial Androids as well as iOS, for apps to track you. You can only reset it to a new random ID but never disable it fully.

To stop all of this bullsh!t, and also to stop the additional battery/resource drain caused by this, I recommend getting a Pixel phone and replacing the proprietary stock Android OS with GrapheneOS and then not installing any Google apps/services on top of it. You can get apps via F-Droid, Obtainium, Aurora store (those are the convenient methods). You can use ntfy as an alternative to the Google firebase messaging (notification) service that you won’t have access to when not having Google Play services running.

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