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Google Sued For Tracking Users' Locations
RedEaredSlider writes "Two Android phone users are suing Google for $50 million in the wake of revelations that their phones might be tracking their locations. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on April 27, is seeking class-action status. The plaintiffs, Julie Brown and Kayla Molaski, are residents of Oakland County. The two say in the suit that Google's privacy policy did not say that the phones broadcast their location information. Further, they say Google knew that most users would not understand that the privacy policy would allow for Google to track users' locations."
Apple was sued for their location tracking last week. According to Boy Genius Report, iOS tracking will be addressed in version 4.3.3, which is due out within a couple weeks.
Just another story of idiots trying to make easy money by suing a corporation.
Cell phones don't work if the towers don't know where you are. Location tracking is part of the spec.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
as mentioned above, google is not a carrier and need not know anything about my whereabouts, EVER. Actual carriers can track me without putting a program on my phone to do it - they just check to see what towers I've checked in on.
Yes, but that's irrelevant. Google is very clear about the ramifications of their location based/enhanced services. Either these people are idiots, or they need to sue whatever carrier modified the code to not sure Google's location aware warnings.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
I'm saying this over and over these days, but: Knowing the location of the phone that views a certain ad right now is not evil. Knowing WHICH phone it is and/or WHO the user is, this is evil.
Google (and MS) just use an engineering approach here and use the Unique Device ID for tagging the location data (and AdMob even adds the Carrier User ID). What Apple does with iAd (use random IDs that get renewed on the iPhone every 12 hours) is much better, since it avoids this privacy problem to begin with. Using random IDs allows targeting phones and harvesting location information without identifying users/phones or tracking users over time.
Come on, fellow nerds: There ARE technical solutions to technical problems. Recognize that privacy is valuable and implement your stuff in a way that honours privacy by making abuse impossible (or at least possible only in a very abstract way) and you can have both: Advertisers targeting users and users not being tracked.
The amount of dumb fear and paranoia and especially the unwillingness to talk about technical details is just mindblowing. Advertisers are not after YOU. They may be after all people in a certain location or with a certain income or whatever, but they do not care for you personally and in fact they would LOVE to not have to care for such privacy problems by getting a clean implementation that gives them clean and anonymous data to work with. They work with "dirty" and too personal data only if they haven't got anything else.
They're Idiots. I just got my first Android phone. You get warned when you go through setup. You get warned when you install and start EVERY APPLICATION that they'll be tracking you. There is no ambiguity if you have half a brain.
Idiots.