How secure are Pixel Recorder files?

Question

I noticed that the files stored on Pixel's Recorder app (if not backed up/synced) cannot be easily imported from other apps.

They are stored in /data/data/com.google.android.apps.recorder/files/recordings which I understand requires root access to directly access the files outside of the Recorder app.

My question - and I apologize in advance for the newbie nature of this question - is, on a non-rooted phone, how easily could these files be accessed by an app that has permission to access media files or all files? Thinking of malicious apps, or apps like TikTok which have been known to gather/access more data than they need.

Answer 1

The directory /data/data/com.google.android.apps.recorder and the files and folders within are app-private which means that no other regular app can access those files.

This is true as long a the app itself does not provide a way to access the internal files (this is possible providing a ContentProvider). But for an audio recoding app this would be quite unusual to implement something like that.

The only exceptions are system apps and may be other apps from Google (assuming the the recorder app has set some special sharing flags (sharedUserId ). But this flag is rarely used and thus not very likely to be present here.

The last possibility is an malicious app which uses a vulnerability to temporary gain root permissions.