Last week, a study was published showing that Android devices communicate with Google servers 10 times more than Apple devices.
This is one of many findings published by this research, conducted by Digital Content Next. The research focused mainly on what kind of data Android devices send to Google servers when they are idle.
The conclusion is that Google tracks the movements of Android device users and collects more information overall, compared to Apple users. More specifically, the data it collects concerns the user's movements and behaviors, but also the way each user uses their device.
Initially, the researchers report that 46% of the traffic sent from each device to servers is intended for services such as Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AdWord, and AdSense.
On average, Google services transfer 11.6MB per day (about 350MB per month) just for the services mentioned above. It has also been observed that this amount of data is sent daily throughout the day, even if the device is not used for long hours, or even if it is not used at all.
But what surprised the researchers was how a device that had not been used for a long time could send such a large amount of data to Google. When they looked at the data, they noticed that 35% of the data was location information.
However, this discovery did not surprise them, as another recent investigation showed that Google continues to track the location of each device, even when the “Location history” option is disabled.
