More Google Privacy Concerns: Yet Another Fancy Way the Company Is Tracking Users

A confirmed practice soon to be abandoned

Before jumping to conclusions, there is one thing that needs to be clear: Google never denied the use of location tracking practices. And how was the whole thing achieved?

The method was fairly easy: every time an Android device got in the range of a cell tower, it registered the device’s current location and sent the data to Google. According to the findings of Quartz, this location tracking has been in effect since January 2017, but recently a spokesperson from Google confirmed that this practice will soon come to an end. The same person also told Quartz that the collected data was never used by the company, even though it was intended to “further improve the speed and performance of message delivery” – something users usually appreciate. What was unclear from the very beginning however, is how we were supposed to benefit from Google’s location tracking.

This alone could have dangerous implications for victims of abuse or key security people in high-standard offices. And the situation only gets worse in large cities and in other densely populated areas: while a single cell tower ‘only’ gives an approximate location, devices in places with outstanding cell coverage are in the range of multiple towers, meaning they can be triangulated to report their precise location.

Hidden practices

The good news is that, as we mentioned before, this hidden practice is discontinued since the end of November 2017. Also, Google at least admitted this dubious data collection practice when contacted by Quartz – but it’s basically worth nothing, since the company’s privacy policy never says a word about data collection from Android devices when location services disabled. However, the spokesperson interviewed by Quartz had an explanation for that, too: as it turns out, data collection is “distinctly separate from Location Services, which provide a device’s location to apps.”

Still, it’s not hard to imagine the ‘real reason’ behind the whole scheme: targeted advertisement, the practice that companies like Google and Facebook depend on. And as it’s widely known to many, opting out of targeted ads is virtually impossible, not to mention the fact that the company would have permanent access to the location of millions of devices – even if its owner disabled Google ads, never turned on location services or used any apps to begin with.