How to make life a bit more difficult for the snoops

Photo: kimkomando

Following on from our story on online security, our science and technology correspondent takes a look at how it’s possible to make life difficult for the snoops.

There are two other pieces of spyware out there that feed directly back to the NSA; Apples IOS and Googles Android, both on 99% of all phones in use today. Everything you browse, say, text or photograph goes directly back to them, unless you disable some of the features. You can for example, stop Google collecting every photo you take. Not sure about Apple  as I don’t have one. But if the NSA fingers you they can override all of that and get everything from your phone, 24/7.

This is why the US is so anti Huawei; they see them penetrating the networks globally with their own switches and software and encoding all comms. This means that the NSA can’t decrypt in real time, unlike what they can with all other kit made by US and European companies. The US have further cut off their nose by banning US companies doing business with them.

This included Google so they can’t sell them their version of Android with the NSA spyware embedded within it. This means the new generation of phones from them will run their own O/S, Harmony, which is based on android as its open source, but it will not report back to Google/NSA but to Huawei/PRC.

Its all irrelevant anyway; there are enough key words in this mail to be seen by all of them; the ‘five eyes, the FSB, Mossad and the PRC, to name just a few.

If you have an Android phone you can go to Google Services and Preferences>backup> and turn off back up google drive, that will stop your photos, for example, and a lot of of your own information flowing back to Google, but not all.

For further reading:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/21/android-devices-seen-covertly-sending-location-data-to-google/
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/08/22/android-sends-data-google-10-times-ios-to-apple/
https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/43361/what-information-does-stock-android-send-to-google-by-default-and-how-do-i-opt
https://android.gadgethacks.com/how-to/5-ways-keep-google-from-collecting-data-your-android-phone-0181002/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/us/politics/china-phones-software-security.html
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/google-suspends-android-support-huawei-3757313
https://thehackernews.com/2014/08/xiaomi-phones-secretly-sending-users.html