https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/1wkv1jj/we_captured_72_hours_of_idle_android_network/
So i wanted to know what an Android phone actually transmits when you aren't touching it most articles say "Google collects a lot of data" but nobody knows to what extent and publishes some proof lets say some packet captures.
So i did set up some old three Pixel 8s on an isolated VLAN behind a hardware pfSense firewall running Wireshark All devices were plugged into power and left untouched for 72 continuous hours.
So some of the things we found out were:
Stock Pixel 8 - Default Out of Box: 348.4 outbound connections / hour (over 8,300 per day). Peak destinations were checkin.gstatic.com (scanning nearby Wi-Fi BSSIDs) and device-provisioning.googleapis.com.
Stock Pixel 8 - All Privacy Toggles Off: 194.2 connections / hour. Disabling location and diagnostics in settings only stops ~44% of background requests.
GrapheneOS - Sandboxed Google Play: 12.1 connections / hour (strictly push notification heartbeats over port 5228 for apps you explicitly approve)
GrapheneOS - Zero Google Services: 0.0 outbound connections / hour over the entire 72-hour window.
I published the raw CSV dataset under CC BY 4.0 so anyone can verify our numbers or inspect the destination IPs in Excel/pandas https://www.praveentechworld.com/data/degoogle-telemetry-2026.csv
Research methodology and per-service packet breakdown: https://www.praveentechworld.com/research/degoogle-telemetry-2026
please share your thoughts
Their research page on the website actually has some interesting details about what actually goes where. That is, if you can get past all the de-googling stuff in between. I have no clue who this company is, and it seems like they're heavily into AI, but this data is completely open and to me paints a really good picture as to why stock Android on Pixels isn't private at all. This is isn't first time I've seen claims of Google collecting a lot of data, but this is the first time that I've seen actual numbers to go with that claim.