Motorola is listening

[shabby]

Literally...

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.

http://www.beneaththewaves.net/Projects/Motorola_Is_Listening.html?source=hn

 

[skyking]

Nice! time to root this thing.

 

[Bman123]

Holy shit, good job moto, this gets all over the web and there will be some pissed off people. No reason for them to need your passwords and shit that's way to much info

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Holy crap

 

[skyking]

this still chaps my hide.

 

[Shackanaw]

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.

The email client, web browser, text-messaging app, and so on look like the ones that were included on the G1 I had previously, which is about as close to "stock Android" as you can get with a carrier-installed OS. Based on my research, it seems that they've all been modified to silently send data to and/or through the Blur web-service back-end

Certainly worth further investigation on their just-released devices.

 

[beginner99]

From the link in OP:

On (some?) newer Motorola phones, there are configurable options (in the main system settings under Privacy) that allow some control over this. I have not seen or tested these myself.

I have a RAZR I with Android 4.1.2. There in fact are 4 levels of privacy setting. The settings are a bit confusing as the "advanced" setting offers the least privacy. Could also be translation issue. The levels are (translated actually wording in English could be different):

1. Advanced
2. Standard
3. Support
4. No Data

Mine was set to "Standard" which seems to be the default level. I now changed it to "no data" which claims it only gathers anonymous data.

I however did not test if this settings actually have any kind of influence. Still I'm glad I read this post and hope that the setting of "no Data" actually has an effect.