I disabled Lock Glimpse package as soon as the new update rolled out. However, I noticed that there was a higher battery consumption.
So fair enough I checked, and sure enough the system tried to restart the Lock Glimpse activity every 3 seconds. No wonder the battery was suffering:
For curiosity I went and checked the activity and indeed it is a system/priv-app, so basically at root level.
This means that if you simply toggle off Lock Glimpse, it will still run in the background 24/7, sending occasional ping requests to some servers. In my case I found “boyuanhulian”, but others have reported “bloomrivers” as well.
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Nonetheless, I decided to pull the LockGlimpse apk through adb and check some of the source code.
In the ActiveReportWorker class you can clearly see the attempt at restarting the service if not active:
private boolean b() {
return getRunAttemptCount() < 3;
}
And at line 54 there is the hashMap for the server boyuanhulian. It basically collects device data (Google Advertising ID, brand, model, connection type, language), sends it to boyuan (chinese domain) and it runs automatically in the background, retrying up to 3 times if it fails.
By navigating the file tree, there are other 2 files in particular collecting device data and handling URL building. Respectively com/molecule/webcache/g4/h.java and …/webcache/n3/b.java.
- g4/java: It collects GAID (Google Advertising ID), UUID (to store a persistent identifier), Device locale (country and language), network connection type, screen dimensions. And all of them are stored persistently in SharedPreferences.
This LockGlimpse contains EXTENSIVE Google API endpoints with: Authentication, Analytics and measurement, Firebase, Ad services and Play Games services.
This is a fully Google tracking ecocystem embedded into a lockscreen feature btw.
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At this point you either sacrifice your battery life by disabling Lock Glimpse, keep it off while still pinging third party domains, or keeping it on and having a full on telemetry system active in your phone 24/7.
I really hope the constant service restart retries are patched. I don’t want to root my phone just to eradicate the Lock Glimpse package.
Full on “spyware” in a Lockscreen app. What are your thoughts guys?
