I recently asked the /c/Android community what information Google has access to on stock Android, assuming the user is not using any Google apps, and was told Google has full “unstoppable” access to the entire device, including Signal messages, the microphone, duckduckgo search history and anything displayed on the screen at all times.
Does this mean that encrypted messaging is essentially pointless to use on Android? I’m a newb here so go easy on me.
There’s measures they could use in theory, but if you switch keyboard app away from Google’s and set private text mode, enable screenshot protection, etc, then you should be good.
But other comments are saying the exact opposite, that Google has full and compete access to the device and its hardware at all times.
In theory it does. In practice, people would figure it out if this was common practice. So if the functionality is built in, you need to ask yourself if you’re a particularly valuable target.
Screenshot protection doesn’t protect you from the system seeing your screen. They’re running software with kernel-level access to your system, anything that they want is available to them.
As to what they do with this level of access, I could only speculate.
Most of those things would only be possible by hiding them in a system update
which they control
Until they use Graphite.