Idle Android Devices Send Data To Google Nearly 10 Times More Often Than iOS Devices Do To Apple, Research Finds

In a paper titled “Google Data Collection,” Douglas C. Schmidt, a computer science professor at Vanderbilt University, arrives at some stark conclusions regarding how much Google is collecting about consumers who use the company’s products, even when they aren’t interacting with their smartphones and tablets.

Among several findings, Schmidt’s experiments found that an idle Android phone with Chrome web browser active in the background communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period. An equivalent experiment found that on an iOS device with Safari open but not Chrome, Google could not collect any appreciable data unless a user was interacting with the device.