How, if at all, does "Google Silently Tracking Your Phone...." apply to GOS?

dln949

I read this article, https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/03/01/forget-chrome-google-apps-start-tracking-your-phone-no-opt-out/ , "Google Starts ‘Silently’ Tracking Your Phone—How To Stop It", and the link to the original study they refer to. Sorry, I'm a layman, I didn't understand well over 80% of what was being described, nor more importantly what the implications are. It seems to be saying that by having Google Play Services and Google Play Store installed, Google is able to very extensively track much of the activity on the device.

Well, on my GOS Pixel in a separate profile I have those two apps installed in the sandbox provided by Graphene's "App" store. I use that separate profile for the few Google Services dependent apps I sometimes need to use, otherwise that profile is turned off. I do not have a Google account, so I am not logged in to Google, do not have a Google ID.

As I wrote above, I read the study, and by the time I finished I was unable to tell myself what, if any impact it has on my situation. If anyone here is familiar with the results of that study and can summarize what it might mean for my kind of situation, I would be eternally grateful.

other8026

dln949 It seems to be saying that by having Google Play Services and Google Play Store installed, Google is able to very extensively track much of the activity on the device.

Not on GrapheneOS. On GrapheneOS, Google Play and other Google apps are installed as regular non-privileged apps. This means they don't have invasive permissions that other apps don't have.

locked I'd like to know more about safetycore photo scan app. I don't want google scanning anything on my phone. I hope it's not present on GOS. Is there a way to know this?

It's not included. It won't be installed unless you install it. The project account talked about it some in this post: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/20165-response-to-dishonest-attacks-on-the-grapheneos-project-by-robert-braxman/44

locked

I'd like to know more about safetycore photo scan app. I don't want google scanning anything on my phone. I hope it's not present on GOS. Is there a way to know this? Does this app run as a daemon?

locked

I would like to know more about safetycore which supposedly scans your photo library. I found the following mentions by Graphene OS on the article:

"GrapheneOS — an Android security developer — provides some comfort, that SafetyCore “doesn’t provide client-side scanning used to report things to Google or anyone else. It provides on-device machine learning models usable by applications to classify content as being spam, scams, malware, etc. This allows apps to check content locally without sharing it with a service and mark it with warnings for users.”

and

"GrapheneOS also points out that “it’s unfortunate that it’s not open source and released as part of the Android Open Source Project and the models also aren’t open let alone open source… We’d have no problem with having local neural network features for users, but they’d have to be open source.” Which gets to transparency again"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/02/28/google-starts-scanning-your-photos-without-any-warning/

What does this mean for us GoS users?

Delaney

locked What does this mean for us GoS users?

It simply means we won't be getting those features with grapheneos

other8026

locked What does this mean for us GoS users?

Nothing unless we install all the required apps.

Delaney It simply means we won't be getting those features with grapheneos

Not by default. No reason to believe GrapheneOS users can't install the apps and have the same features on our phones. Don't know of anyone who has actually tried, though.