Google is being sued over 'privacy-invading' location data collection

[steven36]

Plaintiff wants to speak for everyone affected

 

Obviously, it won't be heard by a judge this senior

 

GOOGLE IS BEING SUED over ongoing claims that it tracks your location in Android and iOS, even if the 'Location History' option is turned off.

 

Napoleon Patacsil, a Google user, has decided to take the matter through the courts. The ruling could affect every user of Google's services.

 

In court papers, Mr Patacsil (also the name of a skincare cream for greasy t-zones) claims: "Google expressly represented to users of its operating system and apps that the activation of certain settings will prevent the tracking of users' geolocation. That representation was false."

 

"Despite users' attempts to protect their location privacy, Google collects and stores users' location data, thereby invading users' reasonable expectations of privacy, counter to Google's own representations about how users can configure Google's products to prevent such egregious privacy violations."

 

The whole shebang kicked off last week when a report from the Associated Press (AP) uncovered evidence of data collection by Google using another telemetry. When asked to explain itself, it said that it was possible to turn off location tracking more fully, using a completely erroneously labelled as 'Web and App Activity'.

 

App permissions can also be turned off at a granular app level, but its the lack of transparency and clarity that is causing concern.

 

Mr Patacsil is looking to make any decision awarded in his favour stand for any Android or iOS users affected. As a Californian, he is protected under the Californian Invasion of Privacy Act. It will be up to the judge to decide if this is a test case or applies solely to him.

 

Cnet points out that Google has already had a Supreme Court ruling on the issue, stating that governments must have a search warrant to collect past notification data and that this will affect that, with lawyers pointing out the vast amount of unrelated data that can be extrapolated from your location history.

 

Bringing that back to Google, the sensitivity of the data that can be deduced is such that if the government can't have it, then, quoth the argument, surely Google shouldn't have it either.

 

Source

[nir]

While the public has been focused on the ongoing Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, Google has largely avoided public scrutiny about its data collection practices despite having the ability to collect far more personal data about consumers across a variety of touchpoints. There have been efforts to document individual practices by Google such as their efforts to circumvent controls on Safari.  More recently, an investigation by the Associated Press revealed that Google continues to track location data even after a consumer has turned off the setting.  While these research efforts have been important to the public policy dialogue, no research exists which looks at the breadth and depth of data collected by Google.

 

In “Google Data Collection,” Professor Douglas C. Schmidt, Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, catalogs how much data Google is collecting about consumers and their most personal habits across all of its products and how that data is being tied together.

The key findings include:

• A dormant, stationary Android phone (with the Chrome browser active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35 percent of all the data samples sent to Google.
• For comparison’s sake, a similar experiment found that on an iOS device with Safari but not Chrome, Google could not collect any appreciable data unless a user was interacting with the device. Moreover, an idle Android phone running the Chrome browser sends back to Google nearly fifty times as many data requests per hour as an idle iOS phone running Safari.
• An idle Android device communicates with Google nearly 10 times more frequently as an Apple device communicates with Apple servers. These results highlighted the fact that Android and Chrome platforms are critical vehicles for Google’s data collection.  Again, these experiments were done on stationary phones with no user interactions. If you actually use your phone the information collection increases with Google.
• Google has the ability to associate anonymous data collected through passive means with the personal information of the user. Google makes this association largely through advertising technologies, many of which Google controls. Advertising identifiers—which are purportedly “user anonymous” and collect activity data on apps and third-party webpage visits—can get associated with a user’s real Google identity through passing of device-level identification information to Google servers by an Android device.
• Likewise, the DoubleClick cookie ID—which tracks a user’s activity on the third-party webpages—is another purportedly “user anonymous” identifier that Google can associate to a user’s Google account. It works when a user accesses a Google application in the same browser in which a third-party webpage was accessed previously.
• A major part of Google’s data collection occurs while a user is not directly engaged with any of its products. The magnitude of such collection is significant, especially on Android mobile devices, arguably the most popular personal accessory now carried 24/7 by more than 2 billion people.

DCN is grateful to support Professor Schmidt in distributing this research. We offer it to the public with the permission of Professor Schmidt.

 

Source

[RadioActive]

Topics merged.