Android vs iPhone: Know who consumes more user data?

Users of both ecosystems know and are aware of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

In a general perspective, it is a consensus that Google is a company that treats the data of its users in a more, say, liberal way than Apple.

Neither company hides this while Apple acts as the custodian of its customers' privacy and lives by reinforcing the importance of the encrypted processes carried out on the device itself, Google has a very different discourse, stating that using data is important to make your most functional and personalized services.

Users of both ecosystems know and are aware of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Now, what surprises us is seeing how much more thirsty for user data is an Android smartphone than the iPhone and that is precisely what has proven a new research.

Researcher Douglas C. Schmidt, a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University, has published in Digital Content Next, a study comparing the number of times that two smartphones, an Android and an iPhone communicate with the servers of the holding company of the platform (in this case, Google and Apple) to send users data. Result: the Google system does this ten times more than iOS, the survey showed.

Some tests were carried out in the research. In one of them, an Android smartphone, with Chrome active in the background, and an iPhone, with Safari working the same way, were left aside for 24 hours without interaction. The Android smartphone sent more than 340 location data to Google in that period (constituting 35 percent of all data sent), while the iPhone did not send anything to the Mountain View giant's servers.

In another test, an inactive Android smartphone sent Google data ten times more often than the iPhone communicating with Apple's servers. The researcher claims that Google has the ability to identify anonymous data because of cross-information, and you can be crawled even if you're using Chrome anonymous browsing if you're logged in to your company account.

Yes, they are worrying information, but Google has its side of the story: in a note sent to the Washington Post, the company stated that the study can not be taken so seriously because it did not respect basic standards of the academic research process and was paid by a lobby group.

Digital Content Next is a representative of the digital media industry criticizing Google's and Facebook's methods, and researcher Douglas C. Schmidt is a witness to Oracle in a lawsuit against Google involving the source code Android.

When in doubt, it's best to consider what's best for us instead of putting all our trusts in company "A" or "B" and you see, even though Apple has been clear in this story, it is not holy either. So whatever your platform of choice, never think that you are embraced by a supposed sense of privacy and know exactly what the consequences of maintaining your digital life, so at least you know exactly where you're getting into it and decide whether to continue it or not.