Daily Archives: April 8, 2024

Dutch investigation into Android smartphones leads to new lawsuit against Google Play Services Constant Surveillance

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The Mass Damage & Consumer Foundation today announced that it has initiated a class action lawsuit against Google over its Android operating system. The reason is a new study that shows how Dutch Android smartphones systematically transfer large amounts of information about device use to Google. Even with the most privacy-friendly options enabled, user data cannot be prevented from ending up on Google’s servers. According to the foundation, this is not clear to Android users, let alone whether they have given permission for this.

For the research, a team of scientists purchased several Android phones between 2022 and 2024 and captured, decrypted and analyzed the outgoing traffic on a Dutch server. This shows that a bundle of processes called ‘Google Play Services’ runs silently in the background and cannot be disabled or deleted. These processes continuously record what happens on and around the phone. For example, Google shares which apps someone uses, products they order and even whether users are sleeping.

More than nine million Dutch people

The Mass Damage & Consumer Foundation states that Google’s conduct violates a large number of Dutch and European rules that must protect consumers. The foundation wants to use a lawsuit to force Google to implement fundamental (privacy) changes to the Android platform and to offer an opt-out option for every form of data it collects, not just a few.

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Identity can be easily traced

The research paid specific attention to the use of unique identifiers (UIDs). These are characteristics that Google can link to the collected data, such as an e-mail address or Android ID, a unique serial number with which someone is known to Google. The use of these features is sensitive. For example, Google advises against the use of unique features in its own guidelines for app developers: users could unintentionally be tracked across multiple apps. However, one or more of these unique features were found in the data transmissions examined – without exception. The researchers point out that this makes it easy to trace someone’s identity to virtually everything that happens on and around an Android device.

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Source: Dutch investigation into Android smartphones leads to new lawsuit against Google – Mass Damage & Consumer Foundation

Long covid linked to signs of ongoing inflammatory responses in blood

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People who develop long covid after being hospitalised with severe covid-19 have raised levels of many inflammatory immune molecules compared with those who recovered fully after such a hospitalisation, according to a study of nearly 700 people.

The findings show that long covid has a real biological basis, says team member Peter Openshaw at Imperial College London. “People are not imagining it,” he says. “It’s genuinely happening to them.”

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The study by Liew and her colleagues involved measuring the levels of 368 immune molecules in the blood of 659 people who were hospitalised with covid-19, mostly early on in the pandemic. The 426 people who were still reporting symptoms more than three months later were compared with the 233 who reported being fully recovered.

The study found that the patterns of immune activation reflected the main kinds of symptoms people with long covid reported. The five main symptom types were fatigue; cognitive impairment; anxiety and depression; cardiorespiratory symptoms; and gastrointestinal symptoms.

For instance, people with gastrointestinal symptoms had higher blood levels of SCG3, a signalling protein that is also elevated in the faeces of people with irritable bowel syndrome.

The findings won’t help with diagnosing whether people have long covid or not, says team member Chris Brightling at the University of Leicester in the UK. But once the condition has been diagnosed, testing for these molecules could help reveal what kind of long covid people have, and thus what kind of interventions might help, he says.

A study last year estimated that 36 million people in Europe had or have long covid. “Many people are still suffering,” says Brightling.

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Journal reference:

Nature Immunology DOI: 10.1038/s41590-024-01778-0

Source: Long covid linked to signs of ongoing inflammatory responses in blood | New Scientist