According to Nokia's 2017 Threat Intelligence Report over two-thirds of all infected devices in the past year were running Android. Android's prolific presence appeals to the perverse parts of people who purposefully position themselves to perpetuate problems. If you think that's hard to say three times fast, consider how difficult it is to avoid the more than 75 percent of Android apps that are secretly tracking users. Yale Privacy Lab found hidden trackers in hundreds of popular Android apps including Spotify, Tinder, PayPay, Uber and SnapChat. Yes, three out of four Android apps have been tracking billions of user's locations, behavior and device usage and could even access smartphone cameras without user's knowledge. Even more problematic is that these trackers could come as part of an app update rather than being a part of the apps original install. That's a lot to chew on if you're considering joining team Android. In response, Google is implementing new standards that will require apps that collect user data to provide a warning to that effect. Google will begin enforcing this in January 2018. Will it be enough? Locations were off, but Google was still tracking users

A recent Quartz report revealed that since the beginning of 2017 Google had been actively tracking Android phone users even with device locations turned off and no SIM card inserted. Android phones were actively sending Google the address of every cell tower to which a user's device connected. A Google spokesperson said that the data wasn't stored and was only used to "improve the speed and performance of message delivery." Still, this data gave Google the ability to track a user's movements to a degree that was both unknown to consumers and beyond reasonable expectations of consumer privacy. Google could actually triangulate a user's location up to a quarter mile and even more accurately in urban areas. The potential of a third-party hijacking and misusing the data was an additional risk. There are numerous scenarios where individuals locations are legitimately concealed. A law enforcer, a battered woman in a safehouse or anybody who just wants to keep their personal business personal. Beyond improving messaging could Google's intent as a company which profits from advertising been to provide advertisers with location data so that users could be targeted if they entered particular businesses? After Quartz uncovered its snooping, Google agreed to stop tracking users by the end of November. But given this history and evidence of the company's character, is the damage already done and what might Google do in the future? Android is a fragmented mess

Of the two billion Android devices in use, half are running some version of the OS that's over two years old with no hope of an upgrade to something newer. The latest version, Oreo, was only on 0.3 percent of devices as of November, and the preceding version Nougat (which was released in November 2016) was only on 20.6 percent of devices