Hacker News Reader

I would like to try Cape. How do guys deal with IMEI tracking from folks like Google when i search or use their email? Or that one is beyond your control?

View on HN

What makes you think Google has access to your IMEI through using their search engine?

Friends at Google :)

Chrome may well have access to persistent identifiers on Android, but websites do not.

The search engine has nothing to do with it.

I thought access to IMEI and IMSI was pretty heavily restricted starting with Android 10. Graphene [1] makes a few extra restrictions beyond AOSP [2], but it's been around for a while now.

To get access to IMEI and IMSI, you need to either be a carrier app, allowlisted, or grant the `READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE` permission.

Unless Chrome is running at a system level in AOSP or some OEM specific firmware, I wouldn't expect it to have `READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE`

[1] - https://grapheneos.org/faq#hardware-identifiers

[2] - https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/device-identifi...

Can you elaborate?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com