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Android P Will Be Able To Stop Apps From Monitoring Your Network Activity
Last updated September 20, 2021
- Android P will restrict apps from monitoring your network activity.
- New changes are going to include locking down "proc/net".
For common users, restricting apps from monitoring their network activity is quite a news to hear. And we are not talking about the part which mentions restricting. Most of the Android users are unaware of the fact that apps on their phone are constantly detecting their network activity while they are being online.
And even though these apps can't read the content you are checking out, they can sniff your outgoing and incoming connection via something called TCP/UDP. This option allows them to see what other apps are you using or if you are being connected to the financial institution's server or any other kind. If you want to check this out, try using an app like Netstat Plus and see for yourself.
Image Courtesy Of xda-developers
The good news is that, according to the Xda-developers, the latest Android P will be able to restrict apps from monitoring your network activity. This new feature will become available thanks to locking down of the "proc/net" which contains a lot of output information regarding your network activity. Currently, almost any app on your phone is exploiting this issue that was disregarded by Google for so long.
The new changes which are coming to Android's SELinux rules will make sharing some of that information restricted to other apps. The exception will be designated VPN apps which are going to get some level of access to these files in order to work properly.
These changes, however, will be compatible with apps targeting API levels lower than 28 and that means that we will have to wait for 2019 before we can see the first results. For those who are using custom ROM like CopperheadOS, these changes have been implemented years ago.
Anyway, the fact that Google is planning on making this their industry standard, says a lot about how important is the users' privacy going to become in the years to come.
