location data

Google is to pay $93 million following claims it misled people about location tracking . The company allegedly deceived users about their ability to opt out of tracking. The payment will settle a case brought by California's Attorney General. The ... terms of the settlement do not require Google to make any admission of wrongdoing or illegal activity. The case was based on two main allegations. The first is about the way Google "collected, stored and user a person's location data." The claim is that Google continued doing this for people who has turned off a setting labeled "Location History." It ... (view more)

A company that sells location data has apologized after some details were collected without permission. Huq says the data remained anonymous despite the lack of consent. The company's business model is to partner with app developers to collect ... location data, aggregate it, then sell the overall details to clients. These included businesses trying to figure out patterns in where potential customers will be, and local governments that want to know which areas are busy at what times, for example to prioritize repairs of street lighting. (Source: bbc.co.uk ) The problem appears to be that Huq ... (view more)

Internal Google documents suggest the company intentionally made it harder for users to stop it accessing their location data. The documents have become public through a lawsuit that claims Google broke data consent rules. The state of Arizona is ... suing over the way Google handles location tracking. Officials say that even when users switched off location tracking for specific apps, Google continued tracking in the background. It only stopped when users switched off a tracking setting for the entire Android system. That's led to the lawsuit, based on the logic that Google made profits from ... (view more)

Internal Google documents show the company's own staff believe its privacy settings are confusing. The documents became public in a court case about unexpected location tracking. The state of Arizona is suing Google after an investigation into ... claims it was storing location data about mobile users even though they had turned off the Location History setting . The problem is that Google actually tracked location in multiple ways - each with their own settings. For example, there's a difference between Location History (a user feature that lets you check back through Google Maps to see where ... (view more)

Google has admitted it tracked the location of cellphone users even when they had location services switched off. It says it's now stopped an 11-month program designed to improve "message delivery." Having location services switched on allows an ... Android phone to collect information about a user's location, commonly combining GPS data, details of nearby WiFi networks, and the location of nearby cellphone towers - all of which can be detected by a phone. Google - and third party app makers - use this data for tools such as mapping, navigation and finding nearby outlets of a particular chain of ... (view more)

The Supreme Court is to examine whether the government must get a search warrant before making cellphone carriers hand over a customer's location history . It's the final step in a six-year case centered on a robbery conviction. Timothy Carter was ... convicted thanks to police evidence showing location data from his phone. In total they had 12,898 records of his location covering a 127-day period. The data came from MetroPCS, which was his cellphone carrier, as well as from Sprint which shared data from when he had received roaming coverage. Data Treated Differently to Phone Itself ... (view more)