schwit1 shares a report from SpaceNews: In the largest commercial launch deal ever, Amazon is purchasing up to 83 launches from Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance to deploy most of its 3,236-satellite Project Kuiper broadband megaconstellation, contracts worth several billion dollars. Amazon announced April 5 the agreements to launch an unspecified number of satellites on Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur rockets over five years. The launches are in addition to nine Atlas 5 launches it purchased from ULA a year ago. Amazon did not disclose financial terms but said it is spending billions of dollars on these contracts as part of the constellation's $10 billion overall cost.

Amazon is buying 38 Vulcan launches from ULA. The agreement includes additional investments in launch infrastructure to support a higher flight rate, such as a dedicated launch platform for Vulcan launches of Kuiper satellites. ULA will make its own investments to support processing two launch vehicles in parallel. "With a total of 47 launches between our Atlas and Vulcan vehicles, we are proud to launch the majority of this important constellation," Tory Bruno, chief executive of ULA, said in a company statement. "Amazon's investments in launch infrastructure and capability upgrades will benefit both commercial and government customers." The Arianespace deal includes 18 Ariane 6 launches, a contract that Stephane Israel, chief executive of Arianespace, described in a statement as the largest contract in his company's history. Blue Origin is selling 12 New Glenn launches with an option for 15 more. Notably absent is SpaceX, which in addition to its Falcon and Future Starship vehicles is developing its Starlink broadband constellation that will compete with Kuiper.

The BBC reported Friday that "Facebook users around the world have been waking up to find themselves locked out of their accounts for no apparent reason." The message many received reads: "Your Facebook account was disabled because it did not follow our Community Standards. This decision can't be reversed." [It appeared in a popup window with the title, "We Cannot Review the Decision to Disable Your Account."]

One user told the BBC there was no warning or explanation given.
While the message appeared on April 1st (April Fool's Day), the lockouts were real, confirmed on Twitter by Facebook's policy communications director Andy Stone. Later Friday he tweeted that "Earlier today, a technical issue caused a small number of people to have trouble accessing Facebook. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

Numerous Twitter users then replied, complaining that their own accounts had been — and remained — disabled. "This happened to my father a couple of weeks ago and we are desperate to get his account back," one Twitter user told the Facebook communications official — while trying to explain the glitch's impact. "He has stage 4 cancer and uses the account to update his friends on his progress."

While Nokia stopped sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine, the New York Times reported Monday that Nokia had previously "worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot" the connection between a Russian telecom and the government's powerful SORM digital surveillance tool. But Nokia says the claims are "misleading," reports ITWire.

Slashdot reader juul_advocate shares ITWire's report, which labels the Times' story "a rehashing of a story published by the American tech website TechCrunch back in 2019."

A Nokia spokesperson said, in a detailed rebuttal, that the Times had confirmed that the documents used as source material for the story were the same as those used by TechCrunch....

The Russian lawful intercept system is known as System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM. Nokia said the Times had suggested that its networks play an active part in enabling equipment used for SORM. "This is incorrect. Like any other network infrastructure supplier, Nokia is required to ensure that the networking products we sell have passive capability to interface with lawful intercept equipment of law enforcement agencies," the company said.

"This is governed by internationally recognised standards, as well as local regulations. All Nokia deals go through a strict human rights due diligence process that has been externally assessed and vetted by the Global Network Initiative. We are the first and only telecommunications equipment vendor to have this external assessment in place...."

[I]t is a third party which converts the standards-based interface in Nokia's products to fit with the legal intercept requirements — a fact which is also reflected in the 2019 documents." The Finnish company, one of four that is able to supply end-to-end 5G networks, added: "As Nokia has made clear to The New York Times, Nokia does not manufacture, install or service SORM equipment or systems. Any suggestions that we do, are incorrect.

"Lawful intercept is a standard capability that exists in every network in almost every nation. It provides properly authorised law enforcement agencies with the ability to track and view certain data and communications passing through an operator's network for purposes of combatting crime."
In short, Nokia's rebuttal argues, "The information that was already published by TechCrunch in 2019 does not show anything more than Nokia's product interfaces meeting the standards-based, legal requirements related to lawful intercept."

Tens of thousands of Viasat satellite broadband modems that were disabled in a cyber-attack some weeks ago were wiped by malware with possible links to Russia's destructive VPNFilter, according to SentinelOne. The Register reports: On February 24, as Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Viasat terminals in Europe and Ukraine were suddenly and unexpectedly knocked offline and rendered inoperable. This caused, among other things, thousands of wind turbines in Germany to lose satellite internet connectivity needed for remote monitoring and control. Earlier this week, Viasat provided some details about the outage: it blamed a poorly configured VPN appliance, which allowed a miscreant to access a trusted management segment of Viasat's KA-SAT satellite network.

The broadband provider said this intruder then explored its internal network until they were able to instruct subscribers' modems to overwrite their flash storage, requiring a factory reset to restore the equipment. We were told: "The attacker moved laterally through this trusted management network to a specific network segment used to manage and operate the network, and then used this network access to execute legitimate, targeted management commands on a large number of residential modems simultaneously. Specifically, these destructive commands overwrote key data in flash memory on the modems, rendering the modems unable to access the network, but not permanently unusable."

How exactly these modems had their memory overwritten wasn't said. According to the research arm of SentinelOne, though, it may have been wiper malware deployed to the devices as a malicious firmware update from Viasat's compromised backend. This conclusion was based on a suspicious-looking MIPS ELF binary named "ukrop" that was uploaded to VirusTotal on March 15. "Only the incident responders in the Viasat case could say definitively whether this was in fact the malware used in this particular incident," SentinelOne's Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade and Max van Amerongen wrote on Thursday.

Tim Bray, writing in a blog post: When I was working at AWS, around 2017 we started getting excited pitches from companies who wanted to be part of the 5G build-out, saying that obviously there'd be lots of opportunities for public-cloud providers. But I never walked away convinced. Either I didn't believe the supposed customers really needed what 5G offered, or I didn't believe the opportunity was anywhere near big enough to justify the trillion-dollar build-out investment. Six years later, I still don't. This is a report on a little online survey I ran, looking for actual real-world 5G impact to see if I was wrong.

OneHundredAndTen writes: A recent paper proposes a new way to put together a message for alien intelligent beings. It comes up with an elaborate mechanism to convey information in notably constrained bitmaps, but one can't help but wonder whether it is too elaborate. For example, for 1+1 = 2, the article proposes something far more visually complex than 1+1 = 2, which could also be, with small adjustments, easily coerced to have a representation as a bitmap with the limitations in the article. It is not clear why the representation that the authors are proposing would be easier for aliens to decode and understand than something much closer to 1+1 = 2: either representation would be, well, alien to them. "Calculation of the optimal timing during a given calendar year is specified for potential future transmission from both the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in China and the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in northern California to a selected region of the Milky Way which has been proposed as the most likely for life to have developed," reads the paper.

"These powerful new beacons, the successors to the Arecibo radio telescope which transmitted the 1974 message upon which this expanded communication is in part based, can carry forward Arecibo's legacy into the 21st century with this equally well-constructed communication from Earth's technological civilization."

T-Mobile said Wednesday that its shutdown of Sprint's 3G network is proceeding as planned, beginning on March 31st. The Verge reports: As part of the shutdown process, the company said in a statement emailed to The Verge, it will migrate customers over the next 60 days "to ensure they are supported and not left without connectivity, and the network will be completely turned off by no later than May 31." Earlier reports suggested that the actual shutdown date was being pushed to May 31st, which would have been the second delay; originally, T-Mobile was going to phase out the network in January but said in October that it would extend the deadline to March 31st.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Collecting satellite data for research is a group effort thanks to this app developed for Android users. Camaliot is a campaign funded by the European Space Agency, and its first project focuses on making smartphone owners around the world part of a project that can help improve weather forecasts by using your phone's GPS receiver. The Camaliot app works on devices running Android version 7.0 or later that support satellite navigation. Researchers think that they can use satellite signals to get more information about the atmosphere. For example, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere can affect how a satellite signal travels through the air to something like a phone.

The app gathers information to track signal strength, the distance between the satellite and the phone being used, and the satellite's carrier phase, according to Camaliot's FAQs. With enough data collected from around the world, researchers can theoretically combine that with existing weather readings to measure long-term water vapor trends. They hope to use that data to inform weather forecasting models with machine learning. They can also track changes in Earth's ionosphere -- the part of the atmosphere near space. Creating better ionospheric forecasts could be relevant in tracking space weather and could eventually make Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) more accurate by accounting for events like geomagnetic storms. Camaliot could eventually expand to include more attempts at collecting data on a massive scale using sensors present in "Internet of Things" connected home devices. According to The Verge, these are the steps to take to begin using the Camaliot app on your Android phone:

1. Select "start logging" and place your phone in an area with a clear sky view to begin logging the data
2. Once you have measured to your liking, select "stop logging"
3. Then, upload your session to the server and repeat the process over time to collect more data. You can also delete your locally-stored log files at this step.

"In addition to being able to view your own measurements against others accumulated over time, you can also see a leaderboard showing logging sessions done by other participants," adds The Verge. "Eventually, the information collected for the study will be available in a separate portal."

Ukraine's state-owned telecommunications company Ukrtelecom experienced a disruption in internet service on Monday after a "powerful" cyberattack, according to Ukrainian government officials and company representatives. Reuters reports: The incident is the latest hacking attack against Ukrainian internet services since Russian military forces invaded in late February. "Today, the enemy launched a powerful cyberattack against Ukrtelecom's IT-infrastructure," said Yurii Shchyhol, chairman of the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection of Ukraine. "The attack was repelled. And now Ukrtelecom has an ability to begin restoring its services to the clients." "Currently, the attack is repulsed, the provision of services is gradually resumed," said Ukrtelecom spokesperson Mikhail Shuranov.

NetBlocks, which monitors internet service disruptions, posted on Twitter earlier on Monday that it saw "connectivity collapsing" with an "ongoing and intensifying nation-scale disruption." A similar incident took place earlier this month with Triolan, a smaller Ukrainian telecom company, Forbes previously reported. That company suffered a hack that reset some internal systems, resulting in some local subscribers losing access.

A "powerful" cyberattack has hit Ukraine's biggest fixed line telecommunications company, Ukrtelecom. Described as the most severe cyberattack since the start of the Russian invasion in February, it has sent the company's services across the country down. From a report: Victor Zhora, deputy head of the State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection, confirmed to Forbes that the government was investigating the attack. He said it's not yet known whether Ukrtelecom -- a telephone, internet and mobile provider -- has been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack or a deeper, more sophisticated intrusion. The attack has only been acknowledged by Ukrtelecom in responses to customer comments on Facebook. In one, it responded by saying that services were down as a result of a "powerful cyber attack of the enemy." When Forbes messaged Ukrtelecom over Facebook, an automated response was provided, reading, "Currently, there are difficulties in using the internet service from Ukrtelecom. Our specialists are doing everything possible to resolve this issue as soon as possible. Due to the abnormal load and problems with internal systems, the operators of the contact center and Facebook can not process customer requests." NetBlocks, which tracks internet downtimes across the world, found Ukrtelecom had been dealing with a disrupted service since this morning, "collapsing to 13% of pre-war levels."

The Finnish company played a key role in enabling Russia's cyberspying, documents show, raising questions of corporate responsibility. From a report: Nokia said this month that it would stop its sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine. But the Finnish company didn't mention what it was leaving behind: equipment and software connecting the government's most powerful tool for digital surveillance to the nation's largest telecommunications network. The tool was used to track supporters of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. Investigators said it had intercepted the phone calls of a Kremlin foe who was later assassinated. Called the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, it is also most likely being employed at this moment as President Vladimir V. Putin culls and silences antiwar voices inside Russia.

For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM to Russia's largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. While Nokia does not make the tech that intercepts communications, the documents lay out how it worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot the SORM system's connection to the MTS network. Russia's main intelligence service, the F.S.B., uses SORM to listen in on phone conversations, intercept emails and text messages, and track other internet communications. The documents, spanning 2008 to 2017, show in previously unreported detail that Nokia knew it was enabling a Russian surveillance system. The work was essential for Nokia to do business in Russia, where it had become a top supplier of equipment and services to various telecommunications customers to help their networks function. The business yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, even as Mr. Putin became more belligerent abroad and more controlling at home.

In early March, contractors working for Google to translate company text for the Russian market received an update from their client: Effectively immediately, the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine could no longer be referred to as a war but rather only vaguely as "extraordinary circumstances." The internal email, obtained by The Intercept, was sent by management at a firm that translates corporate texts and app interfaces for Google and other clients. From the report: The email passed along instructions from Google with the new wording. The instructions also noted that the word "war" should continue to be used in other markets and that the policy change was intended to keep Google in compliance with a Russian censorship law enacted just after the invasion of Ukraine. Asked about the guidance, Google spokesperson Alex Krasov told The Intercept, "While we've paused Google ads and the vast majority of our commercial activities in Russia, we remain focused on the safety of our local employees. As has been widely reported, current laws restrict communications within Russia. This does not apply to our information services like Search and YouTube." According to a translator who spoke to The Intercept, the orders apply to all Google products translated into Russian, including Google Maps, Gmail, AdWords, and Google's policies and communications with users. (The translator asked for anonymity to avoid reprisal by their employer.) The internal memo helps explain why some Google web pages, including an advertising policy and video help document found by The Intercept, use euphemistic terms like "emergency in Ukraine" in their Russian version but âoewar in Ukraineâ in the English version.

The Washington Post reports Russian troops in Ukraine "have relied, with surprising frequency, on unsecured communication devices such as smartphones and push-to-talk radios."

But this is leaving Russia's units "vulnerable to targeting...further underscoring the command-and-control deficiencies that have come to define Moscow's month-long invasion, observers say." The Russian military possesses modern equipment capable of secure transmission, but troops on the battlefield have reached for simpler-to-use but less-secure lines because of uneven discipline across the ranks, an apparent lack of planning for conducting a sustained fight over long distances, and Russian attacks on Ukraine's communication infrastructure that it, too, has relied on, experts say.

A European intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss NATO's battlefield assessments, said that since the invasion began in late-February, there have been multiple instances of Russian commanders confiscating their subordinates' personal phones for fear they would unwittingly give away a unit's location.... There is evidence that the United States and other NATO countries have provided Ukrainian forces with electronic warfare equipment capable of interrupting Russian transmissions and allowing them to target Russian command posts, said Kostas Tigkos, a Russian military expert at the defense analysis firm Janes Group. By destroying Russia's communication nodes, the Ukrainians could pressure their adversaries to use less-secure equipment, he said, increasing the likelihood their conversations will be intercepted or their positions triangulated....

There is anecdotal evidence that Russia's unsecured communications have led to battlefield losses. One Russian general was purportedly killed in an airstrike after his cellphone was detected by the Ukrainians, the New York Times reported earlier this month.
The Post reports that Russian military transmissions over unsecured lines are now even being listened to by amateur radio enthusiasts at online sites like WebSDR (a software-defined radio receiver connected to the internet).

"Don't say the last names on air!" one Russian service member was apparently overheard saying by Shadow Break International, a U.K.-based open-source intelligence consultancy.

Science magazine explores how actual scientists feel about Twitter: "I like that there's a low bar to entry [on Twitter] — I can put something out and see how other scientists are thinking of a problem, people who have a different skill set than mine," says biostatistician Natalie Dean of Emory University, whose Twitter account has some 138,000 followers. But the pandemic has also helped demonstrate the limitations of social media. It can be difficult, for example, for scientists to be heard over the cacophony of messages on Twitter — some 500 million each day. And although some scientists have used the platform to elevate their online presence, that has rarely translated into concrete professional rewards....

[A]s the pandemic exploded and researchers sought to pump out information to each other and an eager public, many saw advantages to Twitter. Its vast reach became a draw: more than 200 million active daily users, including an estimated one-quarter of U.S. adults, according to the Pew Research Center. This allows scientists to use a single platform to share research findings with both peers and the public and to foster open discussions... One result is that the platform has carried posts about a majority of the total COVID-19 literature — about 51% of journal articles on pandemic research had been mentioned in at least one tweet through May 2021, according to a report by the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). That exceeds the number cited in scholarly articles or mentioned in several other communications venues, including news stories, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, blogs, and policy documents. And it's well above the level before the pandemic, when studies found that just 10% to 30% of papers on any scientific topic got a mention on Twitter....

But an emerging body of research about tweeting suggests that, overall, scientists often struggle to be heard on social media. One study, for example, found tweets containing links to scholarly papers typically get little engagement. Of 1.1 million such tweets about papers published before the pandemic, half drew no clicks, and an additional 22% attracted just one or two, according to a 2021 paper in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
An information scientist at the University of Ottawa tells the magazine that "We are really not at the point where we want to get, which is, ideally, seeing the impact of research on the greater good of society."

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the story...

Wikipedia points out that America's two largest-circulation publications are the two magazine sent out to over 38 million members of massive non-profit AARP (originally the American Association of Retired Persons).

It's now starting its own social network to compete with Facebook (which according to a recent survey is being used by over 72 million Americans over the age of 50), Ars Technica reports: The nonprofit funded the creation of Senior Planet Community, a social media network that encourages users to join pre-existing groups around shared interests, including gardening, travel, fitness, food, and technology. In that way, it feels more like a pared-down version of Reddit or a small collection of forums....

Besides its focus on the 50-plus set, Senior Planet Community stands apart from Facebook in that it's not commercial. The site has no advertising or membership fees. Unless the cost to run the site grows substantially, that probably won't present much of a problem. AARP isn't saying how much it has put into Senior Planet Community, but the organization is famously well-capitalized, with $2.3 billion in net assets and $1.7 billion in revenue in 2020.

At present, the site is bare-bones when compared with Facebook. There's no mobile app yet, though OATS [the affiliate organization that built the social network] says it hopes to develop one. The site is mobile-friendly at least, and all the requisite features are there, including groups, photo sharing, @-mentions, notifications, and direct messaging. As with all social networks, a looming question is how Senior Planet Community will handle moderation. The site has a relatively extensive list of "house rules" that encourages users to "be courteous" and "cite your sources." Posts about politics aren't forbidden, but the rules say posts can't stray off-topic, and users can't "attack individuals, social, ethnic, or political groups and figures." Users can report posts they think violate the rules. Currently, the user base is relatively small, so policing it should be straightforward.

"The moderating team keeps an eye on all comments, posts, and updates added to the platform from the backend.... " Suzanne Myklebust, OATS's director of communications, told Ars.

The U.S. placed internet-security provider AO Kaspersky Lab on a list of companies deemed a threat to national security, for the first time adding a Russian entity to a list dominated by Chinese telecommunications firms. Bloomberg reports: The Federal Communications Commission on Friday also added China Telecom (Americas) Corp, and China Mobile International USA Inc. to the list. Once a company is on the list, federal subsidies can't be used to purchase its equipment or services. The action is part of the FCC's efforts to "strengthen America's communications networks against national security threats," Jessica Rosenworcel, the agency's chairwoman, said in a news release.

Kaspersky is a well known provider of anti-virus software, and has conducted investigations into a range of nation-state hacking incidents. It calls itself the world's largest privately-owned cybersecurity company on its website. It says it protects over 400 million users and 240,000 companies. [...] For Friday's update of the list, the FCC said it relied on findings by the Department of Homeland Security and an executive branch interagency body called the Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the United States Telecommunications Services Sector.

"The Washington Post reports that at the outset of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian military communications, as well as that of customers across Europe, was accomplished by the compromise of tens of thousands of satellite modems provided by Viasat's KA-SAT service," writes longtime Slashdot reader An Ominous Cow Erred. "Viasat is now having to replace the insecure modems for all affected customers. This raises questions about the vulnerability of other broadband services with poorly-maintained firmware on their customer network infrastructure." From the report: Earlier this month, Zhora described the impact of the sabotage as "a really huge loss in communications in the very beginning of war." Dmitri Alperovitch, a cyber expert and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank, said satellite communications "have been used extensively by Ukrainian military not just for command and control of forces but also for tactical missions such as use of drones against Russian armor." Said Alperovitch: "We can't know for sure, but this KA-SAT attack may have had a serious impact on degrading Ukrainian military capabilities at the outset of the war.'' Elon Musk has responded to Slashdot on Twitter, stating that: "Starlink, at least so far, has resisted all hacking & jamming attempts."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: In a tally with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) this afternoon, Google Fiber customer service workers -- employed by staffing agency BDS Connected Solutions, which is subcontracted by Alphabet -- voted nine to one to form a union. They'll be represented by the Alphabet Workers Union, an arm of the Communications Workers of America (AWU-CWA.) Workers at the store, which operates out of Kansas City, Missouri, told Engadget back in January that they were feeling left out of important workplace conversations, especially around safety and staffing. Kansas City was the market where Google Fiber first launched, approximately a decade ago. Workers at this store skipped straight to petitioning the NLRB for union recognition because, for reasons unknown, the supermajority of union card-signers were seemingly ignored by Google and BDS alike. At the time Emrys Adair, a worker at this location said, "There's been no acknowledgement, no pushback. No response at all yet."

Among the ballots cast, nine were in favor while one was opposed; an additional ballot was challenged, but the number of challenged ballots was not sufficient to change the result of the election. [...] The Alphabet Workers Union sees this not only as a victory for this specific store, but part of a broader campaign to level the playing field between Alphabet's full-time staff, and its larger and reportedly worse-compensated TVCs (temps, vendors and contractors, in Google parlance.) [...] What remains next is for these Google Fiber workers to bargain their first contract, itself a herculean effort that companies have tremendous power to draw out or undermine. Thus far, the specific changes these workers hope to win in bargaining have not been disclosed by the AWU-CWA, though keeping those goals close to the chest is by no means unusual.

The US Department of Justice and 14 state attorneys general yesterday asked a federal judge to sanction Google for misusing attorney-client privilege to hide emails from litigation. From a report: "In a program called 'Communicate with Care,' Google trains and directs employees to add an attorney, a privilege label, and a generic 'request' for counsel's advice to shield sensitive business communications, regardless of whether any legal advice is actually needed or sought.

Often, knowing the game, the in-house counsel included in these Communicate-with-Care emails does not respond at all," the DOJ told the court. The fact that attorneys often don't reply to the emails "underscor[es] that these communications are not genuine requests for legal advice but rather an effort to hide potential evidence," the DOJ said. The DOJ made its argument in a motion to sanction Google "and compel disclosure of documents unjustifiably claimed by Google as attorney-client privileged" and in a memorandum in support of the motion. "The Communicate-with-Care program had no purpose except to mislead anyone who might seek the documents in an investigation, discovery, or ensuing dispute," the DOJ alleged.

Google's Messages and Dialer apps for Android devices have been collecting and sending data to Google without specific notice and consent, and without offering the opportunity to opt-out, potentially in violation of Europe's data protection law. From a report: According to a research paper, "What Data Do The Google Dialer and Messages Apps On Android Send to Google?" [PDF], by Trinity College Dublin computer science professor Douglas Leith, Google Messages (for text messaging) and Google Dialer (for phone calls) have been sending data about user communications to the Google Play Services Clearcut logger service and to Google's Firebase Analytics service.

"The data sent by Google Messages includes a hash of the message text, allowing linking of sender and receiver in a message exchange," the paper says. "The data sent by Google Dialer includes the call time and duration, again allowing linking of the two handsets engaged in a phone call. Phone numbers are also sent to Google." The timing and duration of other user interactions with these apps has also been transmitted to Google. And Google offers no way to opt-out of this data collection. [...] Both pre-installed versions of these apps, the paper observes, lack app-specific privacy policies that explain what data gets collected -- something Google requires from third-party developers. And when a request was made through Google Takeout for the Google Account data associated with the apps used for testing, the data Google provided did not include the telemetry data observed.