The little pocket supercomputers we all constantly carry around with us aren’t just supplying us with useful information, they’re also collecting a host of data on us and our habits, all of the time. Here’s a guide to what gets collected by your smartphone and the apps running on it, and how you can take back some control.
Sensors, Android, and iOS
Your smartphone is packed with sensors, monitoring where you are in the world, how fast you’re moving through space, which way up you’re holding your phone, and more. All of this data is used by apps to improve the user experience—so making sure your phone apps switch between landscape and portrait modes, and keeping you on the right route for your commute—but how much of this data is logged and stored is largely up to the choices of the handset manufacturer.
In recent months OnePlus has been at the center of a privacy kerfuffle over the way it was logging personally identifiable information (like device IDs) and transmitting that data back to OnePlus’s home base, ostensibly to improve the device’s user experience. OnePlus has since dialed back some of that data collection, and promises to only use the data it gathers internally, but it shows just how much data your smartphone can reveal, and how tricky it can be to know what’s being collected and what isn’t.
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