Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?
Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet, a Quartz investigation has revealed.
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.
Google claimed they weren’t doing anything with the data received from Android devices, and says they’ll stop doing it (at the end of the month) now that they’ve been caught by Quartz.
I’m not sure why anyone should trust Google’s word about what they were doing with this information when they explicitly use location information to target ads and were pulling this shit with no way for a user to disable it.
You can bet that companies like Google (photos), Facebook and their subsidiaries such as Instagram, and Twitter, also scrape location information whenever you upload photos to their services by reading the EXIF data attached to every photo. You can download apps like Metapho on iOS to remove the EXIF information from your photos before you share them.
Leave a Reply