Idle Android Phone Pings Google 348 Times an Hour, Hardware Wiretap Reveals
I captured 72 hours of idle Android packets behind pfSense
A 72-hour hardware packet capture of an untouched Google Pixel 8 found it sent 348.4 outbound requests per hour to Alphabet servers—over 8,300 a day—while locked and idle. The study, using a pfSense firewall and Wireshark, details five main leaks including Wi-Fi BSSID scanning and device serial hashes. GrapheneOS with no Google services logged zero requests, a 99.4% reduction.
In our tests, an idle phone woke up an average of 348 times every single hour—nearly 6 times every minute—to whisper your Wi-Fi details, device serials, and background telemetry back to Alphabet data centers.
- aucisson_masque
Grapheneos with Google play services (sandboxed) only send 12 packets per hour, instead of around 350.
That’s great, but the sandboxed Google play services are by default set to normal in battery usage. Meaning it’s subject to dooze and other ways to artificially limit its background activity.
You neee to set the battery usage to unrestricted to reliably revive notification.
I wonder what the packet count would have been with unrestricted Google play services.
- VCFundedGenYer
This isn’t new. The disgraced Lunduke did this same test nearly a decade ago and observed the same results. Android is malware disguised as a consumer operating system.
- skeledrew
Doesn't really work for me. It's just a site likely checking what the browser tells it any the system. Meanwhile I have a VPN blocking most connections and every Google app is either uninstalled or disabled.