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Privacy Lawsuit Against Google Rests On Battery Drain Claims
Jason Koebler writes: According to plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against Google, personal information about you and your browsing, email, and app-using habits that is regularly sent between apps on you Android phone is harming your battery life. As odd as it sounds, this minor yet demonstrable harm is what will allow their lawsuit to go forward. A federal judge ruled that the claim "requires a heavily and inherently fact-bound inquiry." That means there's a good chance we're about to get a look into the ins and outs of Google's advertising backbone: what information is shared with whom, and when.
Ads are also draining my battery...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Your Ad Here!
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
So in other words your privacy is worthless as judge decided that loss of privacy is not 'demonstrable harm'.
...that is regularly sent between apps on you Android phone... ...you... ...YOU!
I don't care about the battery, I care more on the personal info that google crawls.
It seems odd in so far as this precedent would seem to set up every application you ever buy for court audit to make sure it is absolutely as efficient as it possibly can be. If not, it could be using your electricity or draining your battery.
The lawsuit also rides on the fact that these people bought Android phones at a time when Google already knew (but was not telling anyone) that it would be changing its privacy policy. By being forced to replace their devices - which automatically had the new policy applied to them - the customers have been demonstrably harmed. In fact this appears in the paperwork before the battery drain issue.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Saying that shooting people is bad because you might sprain your trigger finger.
One of the more important words used in law is "reasonable". The phrases "reasonable man" and "reasonable care" are used particularly often. I'd bet the concept applies in about half of all civil suits. If a court rules that a product should be reasonably efficient (and reasonably durable, reasonably effective, etc) that it no way means that it has to be perfectly optimized.
Consider if a product, perhaps a car, tended to fall apart after just a few months of use. You'd expect lawsuits, and the plaintiffs would have a valid claim because a car should be reasonably durable. That doesn't mean all cars need to be built like a Sherman tank. This is well established law, applied in many contexts. In fact, the only area I can think of where we've gotten away from a reasonableness standard is medical malpractice. By statute, that's supposed to be a similar standard, but juries have moved toward expecting medical professionals to be perfect, not just act reasonably.
Technology nerds, especially those who frequent sites like Slashdot where discussions of privacy are frequent and nary a day passes without mention of Snowden, know the trade-off of Google services*. I wonder how well non-technical people understand it. Google Now kind if shoves it in your face, making it very clear that Google knows when you're at work, when you're at home, what TV shows you like, etc. I wonder what percent of average people who don't use Google Now really understand what the cost of Google services is. It would be interesting to see a survey.
* I make no value judgement about the privacy cost. Some customers are okay with the privacy cost of using these excellent free services, other people choose not to. Personally, I choose to make that trade only with Google. One company has my profile, and in exchange I get many services.
no, i think its more like saying that shooting people is bad because you are getting blood in their clothes and hence they have to pay to get them cleaned..... its bad for the (i hope these terms will not become the center of discussion) "victim", not as your example posts it, that is bad for the "victimary"
Personally, I choose to make that trade only with Google. One company has my profile, and in exchange I get many services.
You can't really be that naive are you? When Google has your data, Google's business partners have it too (part or parcel), the law can have it through subpoenas, the NSA... just about everybody.
Besides, I suspect Google uses the data in ways I don't want it to be used. So even if it was the sole guardian of it, I don't want to give it to them. Not willingly anyway, and as little as possible when I don't have the choice - and people have less and less choice as days go by in the matter.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Its great, has no apps, just ads, and a crap messanger toy.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
This would be like suing a hacker who formatted your company web server and the judge refusing to accept the argument that the damage was harm to reputation and loss of business, and instead only accepting the claim of increased electric bill and wear/tear on the hard drives.
Just google you guys, not even a big deal. Stupid victim.
Windows users: set a system-wide proxy and watch the traffic to Microsoft on a regular basis. Windows update, CRL, other mysterious links, and of course their associated DNS queries. How much bandwidth does that suck up?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
So sending information over a network well using a battery to power the system will drain the battery, how can this be a law suit? Wouldn't this be the same as saying, "My phone turns on and works but the battery drains so I'm suing you!" I would make the group of the law suit demonstrate a battery that doesn't that doesn't drain and can still allow network communication, when they can do that they can proceed, other wise just stop.
I haven't a mobile phone of any kind for almost a decade but google and facebook know (from my bank) that I have spent some serious dollars on dentistry recently, their computers are thoroughly convinced I should buy a $350 set of plastic clip on teeth. I don't need false teeth but I post something random about the plastic teeth to web sites about once a week, like I'm doing here. I've been doing this for about six weeks, almost every page I visit is now plastered with the same ad (I clicked on it once just to tease them).
There's some people selling porcelain teeth that started following me last week, I'm currently experimenting with different phrases to see if I can ignite a bidding war between the two vendors. Would love to know how much they have spent on me so far....
Your post is spot on, it's exceedingly difficult to opt out of the civilization you found yourself born into. Ridicule is the best defense against extremists, so my advice is try to have some fun with the absurdities of "targeted advertising", and the crusaders who are battling it..
Disclaimer: For many years I have had the slashdot "disable advertising" option available, I don't use it because I actually want slashdot to make a few pennies from my eyeballs. It's also humourous seeing ads for religious scams posted to a bunch of atheist nerds ranting against religion. If we keep burning gods money like that maybe (s)he won't be able to buy as many congressmen in the future.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'm wondering how Google intends to provide the information. Ostensibly, any RF communication is going to be expensive in terms of power consumption but certainly if you turn off the radios you could get a power profile that represents the state of an Andorid device without all of the activity going on to Google's servers. It's tenuous but while this only affects Google I'm wondering if Apple and MSFT are watching this because you know damn well they're doing it with IOS and Windows Phone to some extent.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Because you made a choice for which you refuse to take responsibility. If you want Android, but don't want Google Apps, you simply get a phone that is configured as such. Stop whining that you bought a product and it is doing what it is designed to do. If you don't like Apple's Walled Garden, don't buy Apple. If you don't like Google apps, buy a phone that doesn't bundle them and then don't install them. You are making a choice, and then crying like a little girl that you made the wrong choice (for you and a small handful of others, that is) and want Googe to eat the cost of your ignorance.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
> When Google has your data, Google's business partners have it too (part or parcel),
All evidence I've seen, and common sense, indicates that the data is very valuable to Google and they don't want anyone else to have it. They'll sell ads to other companies, which Google displays based on the data, but they don't sell the data. That would be giving the other company the goose that lays the golden eggs. Google prefers to sell the eggs, over and over again. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please cite it.
Of course the NSA illegally acquires data from most all email providers, ISPs, etc. Even the services that are explicitly based in privacy get NSLs, so to avoid that I could avoid using the internet at all. I'm going to use the internet, so the NSA will be able to snoop until that problem is handled using the three boxes - soap box, ballot box, and if absolutely necessary ammo box.
A landlord snuck a camera into his tenant's shower and posted the pictures. It wasn't technically illegal to do that at the time, so they busted him on theft of electricity. (Unfortunately for the landlord, the judge herself just had incriminating photos of herself published.)
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Defendants are griping about the battery in hopes of addressing privacy issues.
Google will focus on the battery. Google has lots of opportunities to improve battery life ranging from educating the customer on how to do that for themselves, to providing a beefier battery that offsets the increase abuse by ad data.
Or, Google may offer one free app (with attendant tattle tale stream) as compensation.
In any case, Google will focus on the battery and will avoid proprietary business practices as irrelevant.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
But with cellular carriers billing by the bit, users in Google's home country "pay in both ways", namely bandwidth overages and eyeball time.
I wonder if the same sort of 'harm' could get them entangled in a public law suit?
WIkipedia has a list of a dozen open-source phones with operating systems such as OpenMoko and Firefox OS, which includes parts of Android:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Nokia makes Android phones without the Google apps, and Google gives away the base operating system that allows them to do so.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...
Cyanogenmod lets you run Android with no Google apps, some Google apps, or all Google apps - whatever you want.
http://www.cyanogenmod.org/
Ubuntu Touch may appeal to you:
http://www.ubuntu.com/phone
Wasn't there an article a short while back describing how difficult it is to monetize gains made through advertisements? Besides the bandwidth and battery drain, what difference does it make to me if companies know which brand of toothpaste I "like" or "prefer"?
I wish I got that ad you keep getting. It sounds like it might be worth a look. If by "plastic" you mean Valplast, that's a very good value.
Also, how much of said "private data" is actually harvested the phone itself, other than perhaps location data?
Gmail: That goes to Goog's servers before your phone
Talk: Same thing
Contacts: Can be kept on just the phone without sync (for that matter, sync can be toggled on/off for most things)
Browsing history: Do they get anything if you use firefox instead of chrome, and/or don't sync bookmarks?
Maps/Latitude: Location stuff can be turned off
Most of the ways they can get information *from* the phone seem inherent in the functionality being used: i.e. use of gmail, maps, etc
It would be interesting to learn what data is being "sync'ed" beyond that needed to get the functionality out of the given apps.
Because cellular carriers in the U.S. have determined that the majority of cellular customers in the U.S. are willing to take such abuse rather than moving to Europe. See the Slashdot story "AT&T: Don't Want a Data Plan for That Smartphone? Too Bad."
There are four boxes: soap, ballot, jury and ammo.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Say the complaint were amended to claim excessive data transfer over the Internet, based on the major cellular ISPs' overage rate. Cellular, satellite, and DSL in Iowa are all metered.
That was the deal originally. I used Gmail, and in exchange they got to programatically analyze my mail content. I used google search, and in exchange they got mass demographic information.
But then they unilaterally tied my gmail to g+, and my phone to gmail and g+, and gave me no warning (or any way out that didn't make my phone hardware useless). They broke the implicit contract, by making it possible for every app vendor and every G+ user to access information that I had restricted to Google, and to observe me in ways that I had restricted to Google.
The fact that Google no longer understands the needs of end users is abundantly illustrated by the inane rhetoric surrounding "Auto Awesome", which is like a Monty Python parody of a feature. I upgraded my phone OS and suddenly the pictures I took on my phone are being manipulated without my permission, and I'm getting spam notifications about it afterwards, and it takes ten minutes to figure out whether the "auto awesome" has actually been posted to my G+ public stream or not because the explanation of "auto awesome" is pitched at a five-year-old level. It took weeks before Google made the results of a "what is auto awesome" google search include how to turn the damn thing off.
So but "technically illegal" you mean "not illegal" then?
Thanks for the reminder. I've only seen that 150,000 times in someone's signature here.
Yup! They've tried to hire me 3 times to get involved in that work. Of course, since their lag time between the recruiter contacting you and interviews is normally at least 3 months, and the hiring timeline another 3 months, they have no functional way to get people who need the money or who don't feel like sitting around for six months. So they've failed to complete their interview process every time.
I'm afraid they think they're academia, where the "prestige of the environment" leads people to wait ridiculous periods to get anything useful. Kind of like Youtube makes you wait through 3 minutes of ad for a 10 second video.
MUCH more importantly, though, ads are draining your BANDWIDTH. It's important, because it's also a simple demonstrable harm. If you pay $30 per month for your internet bandwidth, and the ads use up half of it (conservative estimate)
In which universe do you live where ads on a webpage total up to half of the bandwidth to deliver said webpage?
Because Google purposely don't allow you to block the ads in android (*)
They don't make it easy but they don't make it all that difficult either. Buy a Nexus, Developer Edition, or one of the multitude of carrier branded phones that are rootable. Install one of the multitude of ad blocking apps that are available, AdFree being my personal favorite. Problem solved.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
money for lawyers, of course, and phone manufacturers and carriers will have to reduce published battery life claims by 10% to compensate. ain't our justice system grand?
I wish I got that ad you keep getting. It sounds like it might be worth a look. If by "plastic" you mean Valplast, that's a very good value.
It's the teeth people!
Goes to show you don't necessarily have to get someone for what you want to get them for to have the same outcome.
I fail to see any actual whining going on. i think it is a fair point, when you buy for example a PC that comes preloaded, you can remove that stuff - but with a phone, when you buy it from a carrier, they put on all these extra apps that you don't need, that you can't remove and in some cases can't even disable, stuff that uses memory, wastes clock cycles, even uses bandwidth as well as battery life, and it's disgusting IMO.
Well, OK, Google and the government. But Google won't "share" with it's partners any more than it must, because that's Google's business. What they do is say "You want to have your ad put up to this particular demographic? Great. We can do it. Cash up front." The don't sell the information, they sell access. That's a repeat business. If they sell the contact information, that's a one-time sale.
P.S.: This is just my opinion, and I have no particular inside information. But it's what makes sense to me.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The difference between iOS and Android in this respect was that during the Android 1.x days, manufacturers and carriers sold Android phones in countries where Google hadn't yet opened Google Checkout. This meant that in order to get an app into Android Market in any of those countries, the developer had to make the app available without charge. The common way to do that involved selling advertising space. This set price expectations on Android lower than they are on iOS, where Apple has made sure to open the iTunes Store in a country before selling iPod, iPhone, or iPad products there.
SIM-only plans work where T-Mobile has good coverage. But in the states, not all carriers use GSM. If you happen to be located in an area where only a CDMA2000 carrier like Verizon has a good signal, a SIM-only plan won't work because CDMA2000 carriers in the USA have tended not to use CSIMs.
Xiaomi and Lenovo and Nokia off the top of my head
Where can I hold one of those phones in a showroom in northeast Indiana before I buy it, to gauge the look of its screen, the feel of its input, and its build quality? I don't think a lot of online sellers will like it if I buy a dozen phones, try them all, and then return the eleven that I decide not to keep.
flash CyanogenMod
If the headphone jack goes out a week later, I don't want the manufacturer to be able to use my installation of CyanogenMod against me.
Where you live is also a choice.
Not for everybody. For one thing, not until leaving high school, due to minors' inability to form contracts. For another, the people who grow the food that you eat tend to have fewer choices. Should farmers just up and stop growing food? Besides, it might cost tens of thousands of dollars to move, especially if your house is paid off. If moving were so easy, then replies to other comments expressing a similar notion might have been more sympathetic than they were: 1 2 3 4 5 And even if you do move, your new carrier might get bought by one with unacceptable policies.
I am betting you can't actually name an area where your claim holds true and there is cellphone service. If you can, go ahead and offer one up.
You can find several such areas among Google's results for "only verizon" signal or "only verizon" area or "only verizon" "where i live" or "only verizon works".