A couple years ago Fox News aired a short clip on how smartphones track and upload user location/physical state data. The clip is freely available on youtube and it shows how two Android smartphones tracked user coordinates and the physical states (e.g., sitting, walking, driving and others available via Google's ActivityRecognitionClient).
Hardly any of these observations are surprising (Google is transparent about such tracking in its terms and conditions), however, what is surprising is the device that was used to sniff out the packets containing said data. The journalist calls it "the man in the middle device" and argues that it was able to capture the packets containing decrypted data. The exact clip with the device is at the 2 minute mark
- What is this device? (is it something that the general public can access?)
- Is it actually possible what they did? (Isn't the traffic encrypted?)
- If it is possible, how would one do this experiment in 2018?