Google makes it impossible to avoid surveillance

Just over a year ago, an Arizona attorney general sued Google. The accusation was that Google collected location data from users’ Android cell phones, even though they specifically stopped the collection and transmission of this information in their mobile phone settings.

This is considered fraud in the state of Arizona and lawsuits have been held in the US state since then.

What is new is that the judge, at the request of two trade organizations, The Next Digital Content And the News Media Alliance, I decided to post some minutes. The reason is that it is in the public interest to know that Google has used its important resources to prevent users from knowing how and how much the search giant is collecting data.

Confused? That’s the point!

Publications show, among other things, that Google continued to collect location data from users’ mobile phones even though users had disabled location data sharing in Settings.

In addition, Google has made it more difficult to find options to protect its privacy in Settings. The company also pressured cell phone manufacturers to hide privacy settings in their products as much as possible. They are reports Interested in the trade.

Even Google employees have had a hard time knowing how the many different setup options interact with each other. The witness in the case, Google’s Jin Chai, who is in charge of flat services, admitted this when she was questioned in court.

This is how Google collects your data

According to Business Insider, Google uses several different methods to find out a user’s physical location, no matter how much they try to avoid it.

This is done, among other things, by scanning nearby Wi-Fi networks and using third-party apps. According to another witness from Google in the case, there is no way to share the information with a third-party app without the information also reaching Google.

Perhaps this is the reason “Apple eats our lunch,” as one Google employee was said to have said in connection with a court hearing.

The employee was aware that users ‘suspicions about sharing their data with Google could push them to switch to Apple, increasingly allowing third-party providers to offer apps and services that collect data about users’ location without forcing them to provide the information. For Apple.