There’s an article making the rounds from NitroKey named “Smartphones With Popular Qualcomm Chip Secretly Share Private Information With US Chip-Maker“.

This article is a marketing piece for selling their rebadged Pixel phones by picking a random phone and pointing at network traffic. It takes a look at a Sony Xperia XA2 and for some reason calls out Fairphone in particular.

The brand of the device should not really matter if this is a chipset issue as the article claims but it goes even further than just calling out other brands, it also additionally uses a custom rom to check these things instead of software supplied by those brands.

The second thing the article does is point out that WiFi geolocation exists and is done by Google and Apple by showing a screenshot from the Wiggle service that has nothing to do with that. Phones use Cell network, WiFi and network geolocation to get a rough location of a device, not for evil but for saving power. This prevents the need to run the GPS receiver 24/7 since most features don’t need an exact location. There’s no claims being made by NitroKey that their phone doesn’t provide any of