Not only are you implying that there is a back door in the phone operating systems, but also in every other device on the same network as the phone to hide such traffic.

What you’re suggesting is certainly possible, but the idea that it’s been rolled out to the average person doesn’t seem likely.

If there is a generic backdoor it's certainly not in the OS but rather in the modems firmware. The scary part is that all modem manufacturers are based in countrys that are known to violate human rights in organized ways.

> What you’re suggesting is certainly possible, but the idea that it’s been rolled out to the average person doesn’t seem likely.

It's a known fact that government agencys of certain states hack devices of people they target. An "average person" is still affected by this since they can be targeted "by accident" for multiple reasons. (e.g. through friends, being at suspicious locations, wrong vacation destination etc.) So it doesn't even matter if a device is backdoored.

Given how much analytics garbage phones regularly spew out, you'd have to perform HTTPS MITM attacks to check this – and that's the kind of thing that alters the behaviour of the system you're measuring.

I still don't think it's likely, but if somebody were to find some suspicious code, I have no real reason to doubt that it's doing something like this.

Thank god¹ android is open source.

¹ Not religious, I just don't want to thank google :\

I notice a lot of network traffic coming from my phone to *.googleapis.com network endpoints, even when I'm not using my phone. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make?