Android 12 features Material You, a new UI theming system based on color extraction. Find out how this feature jeopardizes user privacy and what you can do to protect yourself.
Basically Android will change its UI coloring to align with your background image, and 3rd parties get access to knowledge about your designated UI colors, right? I get how that can be a privacy concern.
What happens if you set your wallpaper to automatically change every other hour or so? Does android allow that?
Dark mode, screen resolution, window size, and installed fonts are all tracking points plus hundreds more.
As I understand it, randomizing can make you stand out more as an outlier. Its better to blend with the herd. VPNs help by putting a bunch of clients behind the same IP, but if you stand out based on activity, an advanced enough algorithm may pick you out by what’s static and by what’s always changing.
randomizing can make you stand out more as an outlier
I’m sure, but if you have a specific set of colors matching a specific picture on your phone that nobody else has, I imagine that would be more easily traceable than if it were automatically switched out every once in a while. Granted, the other aspects you mentioned might be enough to just render the effort redundant anyway.
Basically Android will change its UI coloring to align with your background image, and 3rd parties get access to knowledge about your designated UI colors, right? I get how that can be a privacy concern.
What happens if you set your wallpaper to automatically change every other hour or so? Does android allow that?
This is common for scraping even on desktop.
Dark mode, screen resolution, window size, and installed fonts are all tracking points plus hundreds more.
As I understand it, randomizing can make you stand out more as an outlier. Its better to blend with the herd. VPNs help by putting a bunch of clients behind the same IP, but if you stand out based on activity, an advanced enough algorithm may pick you out by what’s static and by what’s always changing.
I’m sure, but if you have a specific set of colors matching a specific picture on your phone that nobody else has, I imagine that would be more easily traceable than if it were automatically switched out every once in a while. Granted, the other aspects you mentioned might be enough to just render the effort redundant anyway.