Google Sued by Arizona Over Location Data and Alleged Consumer Fraud 8
Google has been hit by a lawsuit filed by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, alleging the search giant deceived its users in order to collect location data from their phones. From a report: The company generates the vast majority of its revenue through its massive advertising operation, which is buttressed by personal information Google collects when people use its products. But users were "lulled into a false sense of security" because Google led users to believe they disabled settings for location data gathering, when they were still turned on, Brnovich wrote on Twitter. "Google collects detailed information about its users, including their physical locations, to target users for advertising," Brnovich wrote. "Often, this is done without the users' consent or knowledge." The lawsuit seeks damages, but the amount is unclear. Brnovich's office didn't respond to a request for comment.
Suing over data the state wants, too (Score:2)
All levels of law enforcement crave the location data that phones give, and the AG of a state is suing because Google collects it, just because it's not exclusively for LEOs?
LEO gets this from cell providers (Score:2)
a LEO can get this from the cell providers without much trouble, they can get more accurate information from google with a warrant if the user has been using google services and can be specific.
the state is suing based on google collecting information when the user was not made aware so it's effectively suing based on a EULA and if that had enough weasel words in it
good luck
Re: (Score:2)
when you're Google, you can afford a lot of talkative weasels!
My Android v7.1.1 has location turned off but, ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Under options/developer options/running services/Google Play services is a service named LocationPersistentService
Stop it and it comes back.
Google is lying.
"Maps won't work unless you enable ..." (Score:4, Insightful)
I use my cellphone as a phone and little else. When AT&T killed 2G, after months of warning and pestering us to upgrade our phones, just before the shutoff they finally gave me and my wife free LG10 smatphones rather than have us leave their network.
As they were initially configured they burned a lot of power and got warm even when in the holster. So after the AT&T guy found that a couple pieces of the gaming bloatware had gone feral and killed them, I went through the menus and disabled a bunch of the bloatware I wasn't using. (And I never accepted the browser license because Chrome's license includes Adobe's, which has anti reverse-engineering boilerplate that escalates into an effective non-compete and looks like it could become an issue career-wise.)
So I went through and disabled as much of the bloatware as I thought was necessary. I left google maps live but disabled its access to nav info (and pretty much everything else), intending to use it for maps but not real-time navigation.
Since then my phone, roughly once a day, pops up a notifier to the effect of:
Enable Google Play services.
Maps won't work unless you enable Poogle Play services.
But the maps tool still does a map just fine.
I've been assuming this is related to a hidden path that Google uses to track your location and that the notifier text was deceptive.
Re:"Maps won't work unless you enable ..." (Score:5, Insightful)
From KitKat onwards you can't disable Google Play Services at all. A bunch of features that were previously provided by the OS were moved into Play Services to make it easier for Google to update them (and mine data from them). Now if you want to avoid Play Services you need to use something like LineageOS with a re-implementation of Play Services like micro-G.
Re: (Score:1)
ten thousand people dying is nothing compared to ten thousand bucks profit lost. What are you to think otherwise, a commie?