Have you known that every app on your android smartphone can track the network activities? They can track it without asking for the user permission and also detect when other applications on your device are connected to the web.
It’s obvious these apps cannot access the content from the network but can easily know to which server you are connected and all this without the user’s knowledge.
This way a ‘malicious’ or ‘shady’ app can easily manipulate the network to breach your privacy and get hold of your personal details.
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But it seems like Google has planned to address this serious privacy issue with the release of its next flagship mobile operating system.
With the launch of Android P, every app that is installed on your device will no longer be able to monitor what other apps on your Android device are connecting to while using the web, according to the new code changes in Android Open Source Project (AOSP) first noticed by XDA Developers.
"A new commit has appeared in the Android Open Source Project to 'start the process of locking down proc/net,' [which] contains a bunch of output from the kernel related to network activity," XDA Developers writes.
"There's currently no restriction on apps accessing /proc/net, which means they can read from here (especially the TCP and UDP files) to parse your device's network activity. You can install a terminal app on your phone and enter cat /proc/net/udp to see for yourself."
Changes to the SELinux rules assure that the new changes will restrict app from accessing certain network information.
However, it should be noted that the new SELinux changes are coming for apps using API level 28 running on Android P—which means that apps working with API levels prior to 28 continue to have access to the device' network activities until 2019.
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A few custom ROMs for Android, such as CopperheadOS, have already implemented these changes years ago, offering better privacy to their users.
As XDA developers pointed out, this new change introduced to the Android operating system appears to be very small that users will hardly notice, "but the implications for user privacy will be massive."
