C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
Tl; DR
- Pixel phones are apparently the phone of choice for criminals, drug traffickers and gang members in Spanish Catalonia.
- According to the police, whenever they spot someone with a pixel, they think they must be a drug trafficker.
- The popularity of pixels among the bad crowd has much to do with Google phones and everything to do with the open nature of Android.
Spanish police, especially in the Autonomous Region of Catalonia, is very alert when they spot someone using a Google Pixel phone. As strange as it may seem, pixels are very preferred by people involved in organized crime, according to Catalan police.
“Whenever we see a Google Pixel, we suspect that it could belong to a drug trafficker,” said a police officer conducting the anti-drug operation in Catalonia, according to Xataka Android (Machine translated).
But why are pixels popular among criminals in this region? It really has little to do with the way Google manufactures its phones and everything to do with the open nature of Android, which allows users to use alternative operating systems.
More specifically, members of the crime organized in Catalonia use Graphineos, an operating system focused on confidentiality and security that maintains your data out of the reach of Google. Criminals and gang members in Spain prefer to use graphens on pixel phones, and there is a good reason for that. Grapheneos implements complete encryption of the disc and metadata, a safety functionality operated by disbelievers. But it works better on pixels.
Even if grapheneos can be installed on any Android phone unlocked, the FAQ section of the company strongly recommends using a pixel phone “due to better safety and a long guarantee of minimum launch support for complete security updates and other improvements”.
The page specifically mentions the Pixel 8 and Pixel 9 series, “for the safety functionality of incredibly powerful hardware memory as part of the movement to the new CPU Cores”.
In addition, like most Android phones, Pixel devices are on Google’s search network, which allows users to lock or erase their phones remotely, a functionality ironically appreciated by criminals. In fact, one of the out -of -competition characteristics of the pixel – its cameras – is something that these criminals do not even use and have often been physically removed, with the GPS and the microphone.
In Catalonia, a pixel observation now raises more than a simple technological curiosity, it increases red flags.
The police solution to counter these smart tips is to infect pixels with malware to access applications, media, documents, etc. Even grapheneos is not immune to malicious software attacks.
Thus, even if Google certainly did not intend that pixels become the phone of choice for criminals, their safety equipment, their nature adapted to mods and their support for graphens made them unexpectedly for the bad crowd. In Catalonia, a pixel observation now raises more than a simple technological curiosity, it increases red flags.
