I'm using Jelly Bean on a tablet and a phone on the same account. After logging into a particular wifi network on one device, I noticed that sometime later (weeks) the other device had some acquired the settings (including password) and logged into the wifi automatically.
I was unaware that android had a form of wifi profile sync. Is there any information out there about this functionality? How does it work? What other data is sync'd between devices?
Answer
If you go to Settings -> Backup & reset there is a Back up my data option which states:
Back up application data, Wi-Fi passwords, and other settings to Google servers
In addition to this on the Android OS support site it says:
a wide variety of your personal data is backed up autonmatically, including your Wi-Fi passwords, Browser bookmarks, a list of the apps you’ve installed on Google Play, the words you’ve added to the dictionary used by the onscreen keyboard, and most of your customized settings. Some third-party apps may also take advantage of this feature, so you can restore your data if you reinstall an app. If you uncheck this option, your data stops getting backed up, and any existing backups are deleted from Google servers.
As for the security concerns although I assume they must be sending plain-text WiFi passwords according to the Backup Service developer guide they're at least using a secure connection to do it over.
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