Motorola Is Listening

[ka9yhd]

Motorola Mobility is owned by Google.

"Ben Lincoln was hooking up to Microsoft ActiveSync at work when he 'made an interesting discovery about the Android phone (a Motorola Droid X2) which [he] was using at the time: it was silently sending a considerable amount of sensitive information to Motorola, and to compound the problem, a great deal of it was over an unencrypted HTTP channel.' He found that photos, passwords, and even data about his home screen config were being sent regularly to Motorola's servers. He has screenshots showing much of the data transmission."

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/07/02/1724242/motorola-is-listening

I wonder if other cell phones with Android are doing similar things of sending info back to Google or who ever.  Because according to the article the phone is a Motorola Droid X2 with a fairly stock version of Android on it.

In June of 2013, I made an interesting discovery about the Android phone (a Motorola Droid X2) which I was using at the time: it was silently sending a considerable amount of sensitive information to Motorola, and to compound the problem, a great deal of it was over an unencrypted HTTP channel.

A clarification I'd like to make (because there seems to be a lot of confusion about this) is that the Droid X2 does not use Motorola's "Blur"/"MotoBlur" user interface. That's one of the reasons I picked that model specifically back in 2011 - it seemed to be running something very close to the stock version of Android.

[djohnston]

I wonder if other cell phones with Android are doing similar things of sending info back to Google or who ever.  Because according to the article the phone is a Motorola Droid X2 with a fairly stock version of Android on it.

From what I've read, all carriers and individual users are free to modify Android to their heart's content. In essence, anything goes.

[djohnston]

“Are you sure this phone doesn't actually run Android, Miss Moneypenny?”

Classic.