Android Is Watching: 8 Ways A Typical Smartphone Is Monitoring You

Makeuseof -

Android automatically backs up your Wi-Fi passwords to your Google account, where they’re synced to your future Android devices. This is a convenient feature that saves you from entering Wi-Fi passwords over and over, but it means that Google likely knows all your Wi-Fi passwords. And, given recent revelations about PRISM and the NSA’s ability to demand data from Google without a warrant, the NSA likely has access to all of them. But Wi-Fi passwords aren’t the only thing that Google — and therefore the US government and other governments around the world — can get from your phone.

Google may be fairly harmless — sure, it uses your data to target ads to you, but it has an incentive to behave responsibly. But this isn’t just about Google. The US government and other governments around the world having access to this data is potentially more concerning. Google says all this data is encrypted in transit, but Google holds the keys and could decrypt it whenever they wanted (or were made to).

Read More: makeuseof.com