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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.
...doesn't it tell you upon first startup of _every_ Android phone that Google is going to be tracking your location ("sending anonymous location statistics"), and that you can turn it off if you want, but you won't be able to use apps and features that require it? It's not buried somewhere in the TOS -- it's an entire screen that you have to go through upon setting up an Android phone.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
On Android, you have to MANUALLY TURN ON network-location-based services (they are disabled by default), and when you do so, you are given a warning that anonymized information will be collected by Google. The only way you could be unaware of this "tracking" is if you failed to read the warning before tapping "agree," and that's hardly Google's fault. This isn't some sprawling 100-page EULA with the warning buried in the middle, either. It's two flipping sentences.
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"
carriers aren't the issue. google isn't a carrier, its not even a phone manufacturer. They wrote the OS, they're collecting data. The carrier probably doesn't need your consent to track your location, they don't monetize that information.
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.
> Location tracking is part of the spec...
True. The problem, however, is that everyone jumped up and down to give all their personal data to the phone companies with subscription plans.
If my phone is prepaid and the phone company has no clue whatsoever who the phone belongs to, then the towers knowing the location of that phone means nothing.
I was always amazed at how many people were willing to get locked into plans.
Not so; it is easy to de-anonymize tracking information by looking at the heavily-traveled areas. Most likely, those are your workplace and your place of residence. I'll bet that's enough to uniquely identify the vast majority of people.
That's the problem with location information. It's invariably tied to your physical self and your lifestyle, anonymous or not.
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!
this mandatory "give phone makers your location all the time" thing has got to be put down.
Unless a CARRIER modified some app or service on the phone, Google is VERY clear about their location aware services, and allow enabling or disabling them. Thus, (a) either these people are idiots, or (b) they need to sue the CARRIER who fucked with the software to hide the location awareness aspects. Either way, Google is not the issue here.
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.
On my iPhone 4, I can't do that, no matter how badly I want to.
Only because you are ignorant of how to do so. You can disable it on iOS just like in Android.
It is possible that Android is sending more information than I am aware of, but the only thing I have heard of is the network based location service.
The way this works is that the phone looks at what WiFi base stations you can see near you. It then sends a list of these to a server that has a database of the location of a bunch these base stations. The server looks up the locations of the stations you are near and estimates your location from that.
It is impossible for the server to tell you where you are without knowing where you are! The only other option would be for the server to continuously distribute gigabytes of WiFi database information to the phones, most of which would never be used. Querying for just the information needed is a better design.
And as others have already pointed out, this service is off by default, and gives a clearly understandable warning when turned on.
Except until the next update comes out, you can't actually stop it from collecting the data even if you turn it off. That's what he meant.