Beneath the Waves is a personal website of Ben Lincoln, Motorola Droid X2's user. A conscious user - let's add, who discovered that his smartphone sends unencrypted private data without the knowledge or consent of the owner.
Ben Lincoln discovered in June that his Droid X2 was sending significant amounts of private data to the phone manufacturer. And to make it funnier, sensitive data is sent over unencrypted HTTP channel.
The author explains that Droid X2 does not use user interface Blur/MotoBlur - and for that matter, as a device which works on most similar to the clean, basic version of Android, Droid has been chosen by him in 2011. The software used by Motorola Droid X2 has been deliberately and without the user's knowledge changed to send information using the web interface Blur.
Motorola does not ask if you agree to use interface, or if he would like to use it, and finally, does not indicate that any data is sent. A user receives an automatically generated identifier for the service, and a smartphone carries out its activities in a manner transparent to the system to which a user has access.
Among the unencrypted sent data there are among others logins to synchronize Exchange ActiveSync, e-mail, YouTube, and Twitter, logins for Photobucket, Flickr and Picasso websites, but it's not really everything. In addition, inter alia, there are sent:
- IMEI and IMSI of a phone
- A phone number and information about the operator
- Battery Code
- A list of applications installed and being still installed by the user
- Information on the amount of data sent from each application
- Calls and messages statistics
- Statistics of paired BT devices
- E-mail addresses and logins for accounts configured on the phone
- Statistics of contacts on social networking services
I urge to visit the author's website , as he posted some very detailed records of his research .
There are those who shrug it off, saying, "so what?" But I hope that there are also those who take a reflection on how much of our privacy - or a little more seriously as a matter of freedom - there is still in our hands and whether indeed privacy is the price we have to pay for a free and multi-channel communication.
Source Beneath the Waves
