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Google Faces Lawsuit For Gathering Personal Data From Millions of iPhone Users (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: A group going by the name Google You Owe Us is taking Google to court in the UK, complaining that the company harvested personal data from 5.4 million iPhone users. The group is led by Richard Lloyd, director of consumer group Which?, and it alleges that Google bypassed privacy settings on iPhones between June 2011 and February 2012. The lawsuit seeks compensation for those affected by what is described as a "violation of trust." Google is accused of breaching UK data protection laws, and Lloyd says that this is "one of the biggest fights of my life." Even if the case is successful, the people represented by Google You Owe Us are not expected to receive more than a few hundred pounds each, and this is not an amount that would make much of an impact on Google's coffers.
https://press.which.co.uk/whichpressreleases/richard-lloyd-to-leave-consumer-champion-which/
Any more, I think Google's legal department is larger than their search engine department. I think half the world is suing them.
Google is not evil. Therefore Google won't do anything bad with the massive amount of highly personal information it invasively collects about every person ever alive on the planet, without their consent.
I know Google is not evil, because Google says so. Their motto is "don't be evil". Since Google is not evil, therefore Google cannot lie. And therefore, the motto must be true, and thus Google is not evil.
And please do not call this circular logic. Think of it as no loose ends.
and only an idiot would begin or end a sentence with and.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Google's network infrastructure border routers make sure that all outgoing packets have the evil bit cleared, because Google is not evil. That is how.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I don't know about this particular iPhone case, but we should remember that other browsers and software can use Google's services or advertising IDs, which can obviously involve some user data getting sent to Google. Most users probably aren't aware that this can happen.
Firefox is a great example of this. There are a lot of people who mistakenly believe that Firefox "respects their privacy", or some gibberish like that.
Yet even a quick look at Firefox's privacy policy shows that Firefox can collect a large amount of user information, and can send it to a variety of different organizations/companies, including Google.
According to the Firefox privacy policy dated Sep 28 2017, Firefox will send user information to Google (emphasis added):
It also states that mobile versions of Firefox can send some "Google advertising ID" to some "Adjust" analytics company (emphasis added):
When confronted with these abysmal facts, some Firefox fanatics will claim that this isn't a problem because "those features can be disabled" or "just because it can doesn't mean it will". Well, that's all a load of bullshit! Firefox even just being able to send data to Google and others means that it doesn't respect its users' privacy.
So we need to remember that people might think they're using a non-Google software product that "respects their privacy", but this non-Google software could very easily be using services offered by Google, with personal information unexpectedly being sent to Google (and other companies) as part of these interactions.
iOS also doesn't have Google. Didn't stop this. Cause it has nothing to do with the user device.
What Google did is wrong and they should get some form of punishment. A fine is probably appropriate (locking people up seems like overkill) as long as it is sufficiently large to make them take note. On the other hand there is a good argument for the fine being in proportion to the offence.
IANAL but I rather thought compensation in the UK was based on some actual loss or harm to the victim, it's hard to imagine how anyone affected here was harmed to the tune of a "few hundred pounds". The fact that the group is calling themselves Google You Owe Us tells us a lot about their motives.
Also, there are no technical details in the article, but from what I have seen elsewhere the issue involved not respecting a default block of third party cookies. Given that this was not set by the user, in most cases, it's will be hard to make a legal argument that what google did was against the consent of the user. The user has no way at all to signal that they don't want third party cookies, if that is the default setting, they can only opt back in (so you could argue that Apple is to blame for this whole issue). To make a case they will have to prove that they actually wanted to block them and the defaults were what they wanted. I doubt the average user knew what third party cookies were until they were offered a few hundred pounds to read up on them.