I had/have a Gemini (Android) from Planet Computers. I disabled wifi and forced its network connections through an ethernet adapter that I connected to a mirror port->wireshark and through a proxy after putting in my own root certificates.
My goal was to silence its network activity when I wasn't using it. One by one I removed APKs and blackholed IPs and domains, starting with everything from Google. I was disturbed to discover that, even having nothing installed and everything ripped out that I could, once every week or two while sitting untouched it would phone home to an IP address in China that I failed to connect to any software on the phone and whose IP WHOIS made no sense. I asked Planet Computers about it and they had no idea.
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I had/have a Gemini (Android) from Planet Computers. I disabled wifi and forced its network connections through an ethernet adapter that I connected to a mirror port->wireshark and through a proxy after putting in my own root certificates.
My goal was to silence its network activity when I wasn't using it. One by one I removed APKs and blackholed IPs and domains, starting with everything from Google. I was disturbed to discover that, even having nothing installed and everything ripped out that I could, once every week or two while sitting untouched it would phone home to an IP address in China that I failed to connect to any software on the phone and whose IP WHOIS made no sense. I asked Planet Computers about it and they had no idea.
Would like to see this writeup somewhere, both for the results and for the methodology.