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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...

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