C Scott Brown / Android Authority
tl; drag
- Pixel phones in Catalonia, Spain, are apparently a selection phone for criminals, drug dealers and gang members.
- Police say that whenever they are found with a pixel, they think they should be a drug dealer.
- The popularity of pixels among the wrong crowds has little relationship with the open nature of Google phones and Android.
Police in Spain, especially in the autonomous region of Catalonia, are very vigilant when they see someone using a Google Pixel phone. According to Catalan police, as strange it seems, the pixels have been given the most preferred by those involved in organized crime.
“Whenever we see Google Pixel, we suspect it may be related to a drug dealer,” said a police officer leading the anti -drug operation in Catalonia. Xataka Android (Machine translation).
But why are Pixels popular among the criminals in the region? It is really less concerned about how Google builds everything with the open nature of its phone and Android, which users can use the alternative operating system.
In particular, criminals organized in Catalonia use graphinos, a privacy and security -based operating system that keeps your data out of Google’s reach. In Spain, criminals and groups of groups prefer to use graphinos on pixel phones, and there is a good reason. Graphinos enforces full disk and metadata encryption, which is a security feature that exploits by miscreants. But it works best on pixels.
Although graphinos can be installed on any unpaid Android phone, the use of a pixel phone is strictly recommended in the company’s general questionnaire section “due to the minimum support guarantee of better security and full security refreshments and other improvements.”
This page especially mentions Pixel 8 and Pixel 9 series, “as part of the incredibly powerful hardware memory tagging security feature to move to the new arm V9 CPU cover.”
In addition, like most Android phones, Pixel Devices are on the Google Find My Device network, which allows users to lock or wipe their phones from afar, a feature that irrespective of criminals. In fact, a standout feature of Pixel – its camera – is something that these culprits do not even use and are often physically removed with GPS and microphone.
In Catalonia, seeing a pixel now adds more than just tech curiosity, it raises red flags.
The police solution to counter these smart tactics is to affect the pixels with malware to have full access to apps, media, documents and more. Even graphinos is not protected from malware attacks.
So while Google certainly did not intend to be a selection phone for criminals for pixels, their security hardware, modern friendly, and graphinos support have made them unexpectedly attractive to the wrong crowd. In Catalonia, seeing a pixel now adds more than just tech curiosity, it raises red flags.
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