C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Pixel phones are apparently the phone of choice for criminals, drug dealers, and gang members in Spain’s Catalonia.
- Police say every time they spot someone with a Pixel, they think they must be a drug dealer.
- The popularity of Pixels among the wrong crowd has little to do with Google phones and everything to do with Android’s open nature.
Police in Spain, specifically in the autonomous region of Catalonia, are very alert when they spot someone using a Google Pixel phone. As weird as it sounds, Pixels are highly preferred by those involved in organized crime, according to the Catalan police.
“Every time we see a Google Pixel, we suspect it might belong to a drug dealer,” said a police official leading the anti-drug operation in Catalonia, as per Xataka Android (machine translated).
But why are Pixels popular among criminals in that region? It really has little to do with how Google makes its phones and everything to do with the open nature of Android, which lets users use alternative operating systems.
Specifically, organized crime members in Catalonia use GrapheneOS, a privacy and security-focused operating system that keeps your data out of Google’s reach. Criminals and gang members in Spain prefer using GrapheneOS on Pixel phones, and there’s a good reason for it. GrapheneOS implements full disk and metadata encryption, a security feature exploited by miscreants. But it works best on Pixels.
Even though GrapheneOS can be installed on any unlocked Android phone, the company’s FAQ section strongly recommends using a Pixel phone “due to better security and a long minimum support guarantee from launch for full security updates and other improvements.”
The page specifically mentions the Pixel 8 and Pixel 9 series, “for the incredibly powerful hardware memory tagging security feature as part of moving to new ARM V9 CPU cores.”
Additionally, like most Android phones, Pixel devices are on Google’s Find My Device network, which allows users to remotely lock or wipe their phones, a feature that’s ironically valued by criminals. In fact, one of the Pixel’s standout features — its cameras — is something these criminals don’t even use and often have physically removed, along with the GPS and microphone.
In Catalonia, a Pixel sighting now raises more than just tech curiosity, it raises red flags.
The police’s solution to counter these clever tricks is to infect Pixels with malware to gain full access to apps, media, documents, and more. Even GrapheneOS is not immune to malware attacks.
So while Google surely didn’t intend for Pixels to become the phone of choice for criminals, their security hardware, mod-friendly nature, and support for GrapheneOS have made them unexpectedly attractive to the wrong crowd. In Catalonia, a Pixel sighting now raises more than just tech curiosity, it raises red flags.
