Google has been tracking customers’ movements via their mobile phones even when they have disabled functions allowing this.
Those with Android devices, which use the web giant’s operating system, have been unwittingly sending their location to the company whenever they are in range of a mobile mast.
The firm admitted it has been using customers’ phones to find out where masts are sited even if they have removed the Sim card or switched off location functions.
A Google Nexus 6P smartphone. Admitted it has been using customers’ phones to find out where masts are sited even if they have removed the Sim card or switched off location functions
Although the ‘Cell ID’, or mast location, data sent to Google was encrypted and the company said it had considered using it only to improve messaging services, criminal hackers could potentially intercept it and track users’ movements.
Google said the data was ‘immediately discarded’ and promised to update phones to prevent it happening in the future.
But Graham Wood, of online rights group Privacy International, said: ‘When we buy a smartphone we don’t expect it to betray us, but, as this highlights, we have little knowledge or control over our devices.
‘Even when we take precautionary measures that go beyond what the average user would do, it appears we cannot escape being tracked. While Google state that they will stop the practice, this raises the question of what else they are doing beyond the knowledge of the user and why.’
Phone networks routinely collect data about where mobile users are, via information recorded from phone masts across the country. Many users enable location settings on their phone to allow this data to be logged while they are using it. This can build a detailed picture of their movements.
Google explained it had been collecting the data for 11 months as a way to improve the ‘speed and performance’ of delivering messages. The data was immediately discarded, said the company
Police have used this information to investigate serious crimes as a person’s whereabouts can be narrowed down to within a few streets through data from several masts.
However, it has now been revealed that Google was also receiving this data from Android phone users who had a program called Google Play Services – a key component of the operating system – running in the background.
The information was sent even when customers had applied a phone setting they believed would keep their location private, and was transmitted via wi-fi when the Sim card was removed.
There was no option to disable the practice, according to the investigation by the news website Quartz.
Google said it had been collecting the data for 11 months as a way to improve the ‘speed and performance’ of delivering messages. A spokesman added: ‘We never incorporated Cell ID into our network sync system, so that data was immediately discarded.’