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Google Sued For Unwanted Tracking Of Phone Locations

posted by takyon on Tuesday August 21 2018, @06:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the class-located dept.

A bot called Arthur has collected the following story from the RSS feeds:

A lawsuit filed in federal court accuses Google of invading people's privacy by tracking the whereabouts of smartphones users despite "location history" settings being turned off.

The suit filed Friday by a California man seeks unspecified damages along with class-action status to represent all US iPhone or Android smartphone users who turned off location history in order not to have their movements logged by Google.

"Google expressly represented to users of its operating system and apps that the activation of certain settings will prevent the tracking of users' geolocations," the lawsuit read. "This representation was false."

The suit accuses Google of violating privacy law, and cites a news report last week confirmed by university researchers.

Also at Reuters and Gizmodo.

Related: Google Caught Tracking Android User Location Data

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:14PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:14PM (#724686) Journal

    In a fair competition, google wouldn't stand a chance against other companies made by the people themselves. The system is rigged in their favor. Pay attention to where google came from. It will tell you where it is going.

    Nope. Most people don't give a shit. Even the people who tell you they care don't actually care. Consider all the arguing about Facebook that still mostly takes place on Facebook. Or people leave Facebook to use Instagram (also owned by Facebook). Or the complaints about Google that never even leave gmail's servers. Most peoples' primary concern is using the same stuff that everyone else is using. Their secondary concern is using something that's not going to crash or visibly fail. Security and privacy aren't even on the list because they're not obviously visible. People don't even care about the risks enough to be aware of what they are.

    It's ultimately just the old "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" -- everyone wants to be "too big to fail". And they assume that as long as they keep buying Microsoft/Google/Amazon just like everyone else, then *somebody else* will be forced to bail them all out if there's any truly major problem. Because they don't want to be responsible for their technology. They don't want to be responsible for their *lives*. They want to mindlessly follow the strongest, most visible leader.

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