I hadn’t heard of this, and it makes me quite angry. Sooo many phones have Qualcomm chips in them, including every phone I’ve ever owned.
The amount of data they’re collecting is unreasonable for what’s actually required for A-GPS (the only actual feature this enables). And it’s all completely invisible to users because they don’t even include the Privacy Policy with the phones.
If I want to stop Qualcomm sending out a bunch of my data unencrypted over the web, I’ve got very few options, all of which are: Buy a new Phone…
Edit: After more research on this, it seems this A-GPS request is still happening from the OS, which controls Wifi. /e/OS just didn’t reconfigure the Qualcomm driver like GrapheneOS. This isn’t a hardware or firmware backdoor or something like I thought initially. The article seems like an ad for NitroKey / NitroPhone, which is just a modified Pixel with GrapheneOS on it. I might look at GrapheneOS for my Samsung phone.