Google's Location Privacy Practices Are Under Investigation in Arizona: Report (washingtonpost.com)

Google's alleged practice of recording location data about Android device owners even when they believe they have opted out of such tracking, reports The Washington Post, has sparked an investigation in Arizona, where the state's attorney general could potentially levy a hefty fine against the search giant. From the report: The probe, initiated by Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich and confirmed by a person familiar with his thinking but not authorized to speak on the record, could put pressure on other states and the federal government to follow suit, consumer advocates say -- though Google previously insisted it did not deceive consumers about the way it collects and taps data on their whereabouts. The attorney general signaled his interest in the matter in a public filing [PDF] that indicated the office had retained an outside law firm to assist in an investigation. The document, dated August 21, said the hired lawyers would help probe an unnamed tech company and its "storage of consumer location data, tracking of consumer location, and other consumer tracking through ... smartphone operating systems, even when consumers turn off 'location services' and take other steps to stop such tracking," according to the heavily redacted public notice.

Comments

Google turns evil

[byteherder]

First, Google starts making a search engine for the Chinese government that censors data. Next, they buy your credit card data from Mastercard. Now, they are spying on your location even after you turn location services off.

Google used to have an ethical code that made people believe that they were not some evil Silicon Valley company. I guess that is gone now.

Re:Google turns evil

[hyades1]

They quietly removed "Don't be evil" from their code of conduct some time around May of this year.

So yes, now they're just another bunch of corporate scumbags who desperately need to be regulated.

Re: Google turns evil

[Anonymous Coward]

i just read 1984 after much procrastination and is quite nuts the similarities in todayâ(TM)s world.

Re:Google turns evil

[bluefoxlucid]

Yes.

The problem is the engineer said, "The phone has a GPS and Wifi and figures out where it is all the time; so we'll store that, unless you stop tracking location!" Then, when you open maps, the engineer said, "Ah, you've actually asked us to get your location, so we'll store that."

Everyone else said, "When you turn location history off, the phone stops recording location history." They don't imagine that the phone just doesn't tell Google their location anymore, or that asking their phone to tell Google their location (by opening Google maps) would involve telling Google their location and Google subsequently storing it.

Imagine if disabling location tracking actually left it on, and kept sending your location to Google every 5 seconds, except Google's servers didn't store it anywhere. This is the opposite: disabling location tracking stops telling Google where you are--and when you do tell Google where you are, they store that.

It's obviously-broken to us, but seems reasonable to the engineers who came up with it.

So people turned off the wrong thing and are upset

[FeelGood314]

People turned off having one app store and record their location, mistakenly thought they weren't being tracked and are now upset? They didn't notice that google maps still worked, that their uber driver still came to get them, that they still got asked to review stores they were in, etc. The app in question didn't even say it turned off tracking.

Maybe google should create an app to turn off tracking but it means turning off your cell phone, GPS and wi-fi. I know many people who might die of facebook/twitter withdrawal if they ever used such an app.