Phones using Android operating system have been collecting their users’ location data even when the setting was turned off. The gathering has been happening since the beginning of this year, Quartz reported. Google’s spokesperson has confirmed the information. The spokesperson admitted that they had been collecting the addresses of cell towers near Android users. In this way, the movements of the users with Android phones could be tracked, The Hill informs.
According to the spokesperson, the collected data has never been used or stored. Google stated that by the end of this month the phones would stop sending cell-tower location data to Google.
“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. 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,” the spokesperson said, but Quartz writes that it is not clear how cell-tower addresses could have been used to improve message delivery.
All of this raises privacy concerns. Usually, the software informs the users up front if their information is being collected and gives them a chance to opt out or not use the product, but in this case even those who had turned off location services were not warned that their data would still be collected.
“It has pretty concerning implications. You can kind of envision any number of circumstances where that could be extremely sensitive information that puts a person at risk,” says Bill Budington, security engineer at tech advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Even though Google says that it doesn’t use the location data, the company allows advertisers to target consumers using location data.
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