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Google Collects Android Users' Locations Even When Location Services Are Disabled (qz.com)
Google has been collecting Android phones' locations even when location services are turned off, and even when there is no carrier SIM card installed on the device, an investigation has found. Keith Collins, reporting for Quartz: Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers -- even when location services are disabled -- and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals' locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy. Quartz observed the data collection occur and contacted Google, which confirmed the practice. The cell tower addresses have been included in information sent to the system Google uses to manage push notifications and messages on Android phones for the past 11 months, according to a Google spokesperson. They were never used or stored, the spokesperson said, and the company is now taking steps to end the practice after being contacted by Quartz. By the end of November, the company said, Android phones will no longer send cell-tower location data to Google, at least as part of this particular service, which consumers cannot disable.
"Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android,"
Who again?
Not that it makes it OK (at all), but raise your hand if you're surprised. No one? Yup, pretty much. Do No Evil went out the window a long time ago. Google is creepy.
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
So tablets and other devices that don't have cellular capability are affected as well?
Twinstiq, game news
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's no reason to stop at being merely evil when you can be sooo much more!
If ubiquitous surveillance and the extinction of privacy is the future of humanity, then I can say with absolute certainty that I care not for the future of humanity. Not my world, not my people.
Modern day corporations will stop at nothing to turn a dime wherever possible. They know they're going to get caught, and they've got plans in place for when they do. It doesn't matter though, because there's dozens of independent systems all collecting data about you, and there's no way to get them all.
Welcome to the modern day digital society where corporations are too big to fail. Fuck you, please bend over just a little bit more.
why no one trusts the tech companies? this is why. People do not appreciate the ask for forgiveness instead of permission attitude.
I see this repeating pattern where they help themselves to as much tracking and spying as they possibly can .... only until they get outted. Then they only pivot in the face of negative blacklash
Seems like China was right not to trust them divulging all of their secrets.
so ditch google services and use microG. I also disable firebase services from any apps that try to use it. Firebase lets the developer set up phoning home from the app and other such nonsense.
https://microg.org/
You must have no friends or family who you want to reply to when they send you a message
IOW that's reason why we such precise traffic reports for some time additionally to the best times to go to a restaurant, a movie theater, a sauna, a spa, etc. because it reports when it's overcrowed and when not.
It's a good thing.
Thank you, Google.
So you have a phone where you can't receive calls for 90% of the day. Congratulations.
They already map IP addresses rather precisely so all they need is the IP address your phone uses (through WiFi) to figure out where you are so long as one device somehow provided them its location from that IP address. In effect, your 'location' is turned on the moment somebody else has or had 'location' turned on while connected to that wifi access point.
Mind the frickin' laser...
I do not yet have a smart phone addiction. In fact I most often leave mine completely OFF unless I need to use it for something. Sometimes it stays off for a week at a time. Amazingly liberating.
As a gay man, I like having Googles throbbing member filling my rectum. Give me more, master.
Can I get an amen, my fellow freetards?
Is apple any better? I might have to set aside my hate for apple after the fanless g4 power supply debacle.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Google can't be trusted and will violate your privacy. They only stop doing it when they get caught, like in this instance.
Apple is releasing overpriced defective hardware because they can't be bothered to spend their pile of cash on QA and they are actively removing features we need and replacing them with new and unreliable ones that we never asked for in the first place.
As far as I know, Microsoft are out of the smartphone race. Not that I'd trust them any more than the other two, given their history.
So what? We all go back to dumb flip phones and pretend the whole thing never happened?
#DeleteFacebook
Unless. There will be no more than a modicum of outrage over this latest privacy transgression, outside of a few techie and personal freedom-centric circles.
"Google is spying on your location without your approval!"
"Hmmmm... Missed that, but: Did you hear Charlie Rose is a groper, too?"
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In this day and age no consumer should have any "expectation of privacy" with an off-the-shelf electronic device. The entire "IoT" movement is simply there to collect more data on consumers. Cellphones are the ultimate tracking device, Google Maps has done this tracking for years to determine areas of high traffic, how else did people think Google knew certain sections of the highway were "red" and backed up and others were "green" with no delay?
What TFS calls location services is really GPS. Turning it off only turns off the GPS receiver in the phone.
They still collect location data using your IP address the same way advertisers do. You only turned off GPS and even then, you have no real way to prove it unless you run a third party "find my phone," but most can still get the ip info.
actually thats the best use for a phone if you are sane person
In that case, unless you are using your phone as an MP3 player, you may as well just turn it off. Then you'll get even better battery life.
For-profit company puts consumer tracking (and indirectly, profit) above consumer privacy?
Why am I not surprised by this?
Google has done these kinds of things repeatedly, and gets away with them repeatedly. All they need to do is wait for the backlash to subside after every negative leak, because it seems that the average consumer is more concerned with Facebook and other similar things than privacy, security, not buying from companies that screw you over, etc. The people who learn from being screwed over once and install Copperhead OS (or anything that has Google spyware removed) are in the minority.
Like, who didn't know this? If you want privacy you either need to take out the phone-/pad/-laptop's battery or put the phone in a conductive bag, such as cover some electronic devices like hard drives. You think that all the news about personal electronic intrusion did not affect you? (In a pinch, 3 layers of aluminum foil will quiet the device that you believe is "off")
I have all google services quarantined and every google domain name blocked via AdAway. I'd like to know how they were shipping this information out to see if I have it blocked. The article is devoid of technical information.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
How unexpected, who would have expected it?
I'm sure it will be removed from the code base post haste and we can all rest assured it's all gone, forgotten and that our faith and trust can be restored.
Never do it again, promise.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I have a HTC phone with a Verizon "Hello" startup screen which runs Android. I'm guessing that the Verizon startup screen starts Android as a VM. Results -- 3 companies, not just Google, collecting data from the phone... and that''s before the apps and any Stingrays that happen to be nearby. At startup, Google Play starts a stealthy download (if you swipe the indicator, it disappears), probably checking for updates.
It seems like a great business opportunity -- a moderately expensive ($400?) phone that doesn't steal your data. Why does every startup which starts with that idea disappear?
They still collect location data using your IP address the same way advertisers do. You only turned off GPS and even then, you have no real way to prove it unless you run a third party "find my phone," but most can still get the ip info.
My IP address is not exactly Me. It can be many things.
This is why I'm looking hard at the "Librem 5" linux phone for my next handset.
It has hardware switches for camera / wifi & bluetooth / baseband radio. When it says those services are off, it means it!
https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
Rather than just abandoning "don't be evil", Google has gone the opposite way and are following the maxim "let's be evil".
Question now is.. does it send the bundled data over during those 10% youâ(TM)re online?
Since when "having friends or family" means "being constantly supervised and available at a whim to anyone"?
I'm not enabling airplane mode at all times, but it's very often for me to have all sounds and vibrations turned off and just check the phone when it's convenient for me. The phone's main use case is to be able to get online when on the go, and that's about it. And when I'm online, there's plenty of IMs to use there.
By the end of November, the company said, Android phones will no longer send cell-tower location data to Google
I've got a bridge to sell you..
So you have a phone where you can't receive calls for 90% of the day. Congratulations.
Actually, he has a PDA (that also plays music, takes pictures, lets you read books/magazines, etc.) that can receive calls 10% of the day. Think about how anybody who works in a white collar profession uses their phone. I bet 90% PDA (that also plays music, takes pictures, lets you read books/magazines, etc.) with 10% phone split pretty accurately describes how most of them use their devices. It is pretty close for me.
Of course some people are tethered to their phone for voice/text connectivity, but there are plenty of folks who view their device as a tool, not a slave master.
Anyone with an Android OS (and probably iOS for that matter). has limited if any true control on their phones. They are basically trojans to collect data from you. One can try to install Cyanogen or LineageOS
https://download.lineageos.org...
There is Also PureOS. Because it's not Google default you don't get the Google app #$%, but becuase they are derived from Android, it's not clear whether the tracking functionality is fully under your control or not. But at least the odds are better than pure Google Android, which, frankly, it's not surprise they have little "gems" in data collection they make it impossible for you to turn of..like Microsoft Updates in Windows 8/10. (Anyone using these OS's cannot turn off a lot of the data collection or updates there either)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
You could get a phone an foreign country that doesn't allow android, like China, get their OS and possibly use it in North America. the phone wouldn't be trying to send your location data to Google or any other USA company/agency. Of course it would be sending data to China, but they may be blocked by North American government firewalls or such, so that could be an interesting way to express your outrage. In general, if you don't want people to spy on you, say you know, and then say "no". there are a few creative ways. The catch-22 with freedom, is...it is far from free. You have to always be fighting for it, not with guns, but conviction.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers -- even when location services are disabled -- and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals' locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy. [emphasis added]
This seems to be a giant leap between collecting cell tower data and knowing where individuals are that is totally dependent on their implementation. Just to be concrete/pedantic, let's suppose that message sent by each phone was "Here's a list of cell towers I can see: { ... }" and that the server processed this by incrementing a counter for tower in the list and nothing more. I think most of us would conclude that in that case Google has no information about any individual's location.
To be clear, I'm not asserting this is their implementation because I don't know. Maybe they are collecting the cell towers along with phone serial numbers, google account information and penis size into a giant location/dong database, in which case the summary might be accurate. But the author doesn't know that, or at least doesn't cite her sources. The best course of action would be for Google to publicly state which data are sent and how that data are persisted on the back end. Then we might be judging whether they were doing evil on actual facts rather than speculation.
Finally, a plea for sanity: telemetry is often implemented in awful, privacy-destroying ways. It is also often thoughtfully implemented in ways that preserve individual privacy. Take, for instance, a mobile web browser: there is world of difference between: "Version X.Y.Z, Serial XXYYZZ, at midgetclownporn.co.uk/vid/xdfj23, callstack follows" and another sending reports like "Version X.Y.Z, crashed twice at JS module, once in bookmarks module".
If you are unable or unwilling to see the difference, then you're not likely to be an effective advocate for privacy.
Write an app to open that data and scramble it, and a hook that intercepts the tower address, and adds a random 300 mile offset.False data costs advertisers money, and they are furious when they get outrageous false leads and childlike prank names
In fact change it to Area 51 , and Death Valley - they will be hard pressed to find nearby businesses,
call it "sharing"
Indeed it would only have to send a tiny amount of data to have a log of physical location every 15 minutes (say). That can be sent nearly when the phone goes online as part of the phone's routine communication with Google.
Airplane mode is little protection at all.
Google effectively convinced all switch and hub manufacturers to all access to GOOGLE ANALYTICS services by clients that failed to auth the host domain key and but to dhcp in parallel.
That takes a lot of balls to circumvent and not be sued into oblicion by security standards officials and experts if not owners.
For everything else, i see FakeGPS and other Google API supplanted tech to sandbox every Google breach.
has access to data about individuals' locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy
Err no. The "reasonable consumer" doesn't give a crap about their privacy providing pictures of their penises aren't shared on the internet, errr, except to people who they send them to on purpose.
Dick move yes (pun intended) but very few people will give a crap, especially no "reasonable consumers".
You realize this is REQUIRED for cell phone usage right? E911
That's nothing. I carry around my cellphone without battery. Track that, Google!
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
Ubuntu Touch kinda failed, smaller distro options are very hard to get and I don't really know the status of those (like Purism and whatnot)... anyone knows of non-Android Linux fully functional smartphones and tablets?
I just burned my 3rd attempt of installing a Linux distro on yet another chinese tablet that won't work well enough and has some weird lock in place to prevent people from changing the OS, I'm honestly tired of trying at this point. And I can't spend much on this, seems all ready made options are both hard to find and too pricey for what they are offering.
It has just been revealed all sorts of crap that my current brand of smartphone (OnePlus) goes to collect data plus stupidly insert root access into their devices eschewing any sort of good security practice. And now this.
Getting harder and harder to escape big brother these days.
I was so disappointed on iPhone 8/X this year. Bought an Android phone, many apps requested permission to access my contact, phone, and location. Could not take this! Bought an iPhone 8P at the end.
^(oo)^pig~
Trust anyone who says, "Trust me."
Having to disarm a new phone before I use it.
Android still collects location data when it is in airplane mode; the data is cached and sent to the mother ship when the phone has a network connection.
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I am getting quite a bit of practice in wiping Google's stock from the Nexus 6, and cutting all ties to Google.
I wonder if and when I will do it to my own phone, and confine Google to the GApps Browser on F-Droid. Maybe soon.
When the CopperheadOS licensing story ran here a couple weeks ago, most of the comments were negative against Copperhead, but guess what? Their build of Android is precisely to prevent stuff like this.
Unless your phone has a removable battery, it's always on, even when it's off.
You can set Airplane mode to with or without wifi. Airplane mode without wi-fi, you have no IP You don't talk to Google, Google doesn't talk to you. With wifi, at best, they can guess your ISP's location, but it is just as easily a VPN or other intermediate service, and those can be anywhere on the globe.
" ... By the end of November, the company said, Android phones will no longer send cell-tower location data to Google, at least as part of this particular service, which consumers cannot disable. ..."
Translation: we are very sorry that somebody discovered our homing data being transferred, by the end of November we will have made sure that nobody will be able to detect it anymore.
Microsoft is not any more trustworthy than Google. Okay, maybe slightly more, but is that really good enough?
Use Startpage as your search engine. Extremely secure and private (even more than DuckDuckGo) and returns Google results, so you get Google quality without Google data mining.
https://www.startpage.com/
From the website: "Store (Phonesky) is a frontend application providing access to the Google Play Store to download and update applications. Development is in early stage and there is no usable application yet."
Sure, there's hype now. But just like Firefox OS and Windows Phone it won't get mainstream interest which means lack of developers and good useful apps. Mark my words, in 5 years or less they will discontinue development.
Just in case anyone has not yet received the memo. Carrier pigeons tend to be particularly unreliable this time of year.
My location and communication habits is all my intellectual property and may not be collected or used for any reason.
If Google violates this then they are accepting that they owe me 1 Billion U.S. Sollars payable upon demand.
If you connect to cellular towers, it is tracked by the provider. What's the difference if Google has the information too? Do you actually trust Verizon more than Google?
Do you think that turning off your cellular connection and just using WiFi will help? Think again. Virtually every major site you connect to tracks your IP which will be the WiFi's IP. It's a simple database lookup from there. To pinpoint your location to within the WiFi range. Google has a bit more accuracy because they triangulate based on all WiFis your phone can see rather than just using the one IP, but all know approximately where you are.
Many people today drive vehicles that are tracked and don't even think about it.
If you walk down a city street, use an ATM, use a debit or credit card to pay at any business, and so many other things that people don't think about, you're tracked. How many times have you been called about credit cards in your name being used in two different places during a timespan that made travel from one to another impossible? Maybe that one isn't super common, but I've had it happen many times.
Location privacy is virtually dead. The ship has sailed. Anyone using fear of it to shock us today has some agenda of their own.
Wow, you really are an ape.
I have happily blocked all their publicly known domains.
Google is a street...filled with pieces of shit from India
ftfy
I was right all along. -RS
It is not really 'this generation'.
I am around the same age you are and am seeing this from my post ww2 (pre-boomer, based on the current definition) parents, as well as my peers, as well as the younger post-columbine generation.
The privacy and intellectual capabilities are being abandoned by people across the spectrum, even as those same people polarize into two nation spanning sports teams screaming and frothing at each other and only teaming up to belittle the people who don't think sports or the current environ of critic thinkingless partisan politics make much sense :) Some of this is understandable. If you have any concerns over privacy you already lost control of them, between columbine, corporations demanding your SSN and other personal information (which they have since lost, not even due to hackers, but due to sheer negligence), and the dhs and increasingly invasive spying from the government, most of which was being pitched back in the 80s and 90s, with at least some amount of resistance from members of both parties, or else it would have passed completely back then. In the time since however, as stockholm syndrome has set in, more and more people have been willing to give up their essential freedoms, not even for security, but simply for convenience, without any concern for how it affects others, or soon, themselves.
Camera app takes photo, (GPS disabled for this app) broadcasts photo to entire system.
Google Maps (with GPS) picks up the broadcast and tags the photo with location and uploads it.
You can't block Maps from using GPS.
Ergo, android permissions mean nothing because there is no permissions firewall.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.