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Its come to my understanding that Verizon gets information about how you use your phone reported back to it. Information such as "Amount of data used for Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix" etc. I know Verizon can always see the amount of data I used, but I'd rather keep the specific content/origination of the data private.

A friend told me that I can "root my phone and disable that reporting" but I didn't get all the information. I wanted to ask this community:

  1. How to disable reporting back (hopefully without rooting the phone)
  2. If rooting is required, what the most effective way of accomplishing all this is?

For some reason, googling around for this issue has given me no information! (I am a bit shocked at that as I figure it'd be a hot topic now-a-days).

FYI - In case you are curious, I do feel how I use data is a private matter and unless a company issues a warrant, should not look at the type of traffic I carry. Its just a principal I live by.

Note - Just in case, I am sure Verizon isn't specifically sniffing my packets. My concern is Verizon seeing things like: 100 Mbs on Facebook 200 Mbs on Snapchat 500 MBs on Netflix etc It just feels weird to me that they can see this information. I'd like to disable that reporting.

Lastly: I'm using a Verizon Samsung Galaxy S4 running KitKat 4.4.2, Kernel vs 3.4.0.

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    I'd press your friend for details, honestly. I doubt your phone is "sending" the data usage to Verizon at all. They're simply tracking your data usage themselves, on their switches and infrastructure. After all, they're effectively your ISP when using your phone's data connection. All of your traffic is travelling through them, and they (presumably) have lots of network monitoring tools in place that track packet destinations, origin, times, etc. A VPN might work to obfuscate this, if you're looking for something like that. May 12, 2014 at 18:40
  • To be fair, my friend is on T Mobile. Perhaps they are different? As for VPN, that is an idea though I'd rather not add another layer + pay extra $
    – E.S.
    May 12, 2014 at 18:45
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    I can't imagine a situation where a carrier would be relying on the phone to communicate bandwidth usage in that way. All they're doing is monitoring the bandwidth used by your device as they handle it (again, it flows through their pipes, they can already track the bandwidth). Forcing the device to report its own usage somehow would be substantially more prone to error, and possibly even spoofing, which would greatly endanger the data packages sold by carriers (and therefore, their profit margins) which rely on accurate bandwidth accounting. May 12, 2014 at 18:50
  • My friend told me the name of the tracking system is Carrier IQ engadget.com/2011/12/01/…
    – E.S.
    May 12, 2014 at 22:29
  • This app will tell you for sure if you have Carrier IQ on your device. play.google.com/store/apps/…
    – Scott Odle
    May 14, 2014 at 13:22

2 Answers 2

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The most effective way to block this, is by rooting your device, and remove or freeze the offending app. Try TitaniumBackup, AppQuarantine and AFWall+. But the simplest way, may be to try to install a hosts file that blocks all bad IP addresses, such as the one provided by MoaAB. You can try that without root, but I doubt it will work on your 4.4.2.

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I have the best way to do this, you must be rooted unfortunately.

You need to edit build.prop and add this line ro.config.nocheckin and put true.

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