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Quartz has found that Android phones have been tracking user locations and sending them to Google throughout 2017:
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.
The cell tower addresses have been included in information sent to the system Google uses to manage push notifications and messages on Android phones for the past 11 months, according to a Google spokesperson. They were never used or stored, the spokesperson said, and the company is now taking steps to end the practice after being contacted by Quartz. By the end of November, the company said, Android phones will no longer send cell-tower location data to Google, at least as part of this particular service, which consumers cannot disable.
"In January of this year, we began looking into using Cell ID codes as an additional signal to further improve the speed and performance of message delivery," the Google spokesperson said in an email. "However, we never incorporated Cell ID into our network sync system, so that data was immediately discarded, and we updated it to no longer request Cell ID."
Also at TechCrunch and Engadget.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Wednesday November 22 2017, @07:58AM (1 child)
Actually, they were not really lying. To quote the summary, emphasis by me:
So they didn't really assert that the data won't be collected any more, they only asserted that it will no longer be done through this particular service.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @03:57PM
yes, and isn't it convenient that they already had a plan to stop it -- once it was pointed out to them it was happening on nearly all of their devices?
I expect then that the security model of android systems will allow for a software push to the android OSes in question, like those regular security updates they send out that the cell phone companies readily embrace and push to keep older hardware working on their network without the need to buy a new device?
Or by "stop collecting" do they mean that the phones will still transmit the location data because its not their responsibility to tell cell phone companies how to manage the devices connecting to their networks, but that they will not be looking at it except under a court order so that when people think their phone is off they are still trackable as required?