Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Are My Drone Apps Phoning Home?
Slashdot reader bitwraith noticed something suspicious after flying "a few cheap, ready-to-fly quadcopters" with their smartphone apps, including drones from Odyssey and Eachine.
I often turn off my phone's Wi-Fi support before plugging it in to charge at night, only to discover it has mysteriously turned on in the morning. After checking the Wi-Fi Control History on my S7, it appears as though the various cookie-cutter apps for these drones wake up to phone home in the night after they are opened, while the phone is charging. I tried contacting the publisher of the Odyssey VR app, with no reply.
I would uninstall the app, but then how would I fly my drone? Why did Google grant permission to control Wi-Fi state implicitly to all apps, including these abusers? Are the apps phoning home to report my flight history?
The original submission asks about similar experiences from other drone-owning Slashdot users -- so leave your best answers in the comments. What's making this phone wake up in the night?
Are the drone apps phoning home?
I would uninstall the app, but then how would I fly my drone? Why did Google grant permission to control Wi-Fi state implicitly to all apps, including these abusers? Are the apps phoning home to report my flight history?
The original submission asks about similar experiences from other drone-owning Slashdot users -- so leave your best answers in the comments. What's making this phone wake up in the night?
Are the drone apps phoning home?
Analytics. Telemetry. Whatever you want to call it, data is traversing the network without your explicit approval.
I've found that using a Pi-hole and adding the domains they're trying to call to the blacklist to be useful.
Submitter is now learning how to disallow an app from doing this on Android. Some apps you *do* want to be able to turn on WiFi on its own (e.g. VoIP phone app if you don't want it burning your cellular data).
If you know you're technically incompetent and want someone to handhold you through your phone "ownership", then iOS is what you want. If you have the technical knowledge to tweak the phone and want the freedom to use your phone however you want, then Android is what you want. Just like some people like to buy a Toyota and take the car to the dealer at regular service intervals, while other people buy a Chevy and modify or tweak every single component and do all the maintenance themselves. Different strokes for different folks.
How is this even possible!?
Although I have owned a few Android phones over the last few year, my primary smartphone has been an iPhone since the iPhone 3G. So, the idea that a third party app could turn on radios in my mobile device without my permission or knowledge is simply insane to me.
Besides just the loss of personal privacy and violation of confidentiality (depending on what the app is doing when it turns on the radio), many people still have capped or metered internet services, and this app could be draining that without the handset owner's permission!
Unbelievable... just unbelievable.
In this day and age, you have to assume that every piece of software you run on any platform will be phoning home.
That's why I firewall all traffic, incoming and outgoing, these days, especially on my phone. It's also rather interesting examining the logs of what was blocked.
In fact, as I was doing routine firewall maintenance over the weekend, it occurred to me that at some point I made a shift -- I now pay more attention to outgoing traffic than incoming!
Industry trends have resulted in it becoming necessary to treat all devices and software, inside or out, as threats.