10 ms·

Google misled consumers about the collection and use of location data

538 points by Khaine 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
treelovinhippie 6y ago
And I'm guessing the fine will be something abysmally small. Fine them $5B: $2.5B in taxes (since they don't pay their fair share) and $2.5B in class action distributed to affected users. In 2020 they made $4.8B in revenue locally in Australia but ran most of that on the books through Singapore. Dodgy. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-18/google-pays-more-tax-but-still-makes-billions-in-singapore/12254448 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-18/google-pays-more-tax-... HN'rs will upvote posts/comments on Google taking away privacy. But mention that Google should be paying their fair share of tax in the country they extract those revenues from or be punished in proportion to their revenues for severe consumer rights violations... downvotes. Pathetic.
- austhrow743 6y ago
  There's no way we're worth $50B to them.
- wisdomdata 6y ago
  the question is, are the downvoters paid or incentivised to do so? we will never know.
- mdoms 6y ago
  You can't "fine" someone "tax". What does that even mean?
gigatexal 6y ago
Is anyone surprised?
- Majestic121 6y ago
  > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26832412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26832412 Yes, I'm surprised that the "Web & App" permission also gives access to my location when there's another permission called "Location history". Are you not ?
  - 1_person 6y ago
    I'm personally more annoyed that even with GPS disabled and denied to all applications Google Play Services enables it and samples the location randomly. It even brags on the status screen that it's doing it, like Google grabbing your lunch money and asking what you're going to do about it, punk?
izacus 6y ago
The important parts: > The Court ruled that when consumers created a new Google Account during the initial set-up process of their Android device, Google misrepresented that the ‘Location History’ setting was the only Google Account setting that affected whether Google collected, kept or used personally identifiable data about their location. In fact, another Google Account setting titled ‘Web & App Activity’ also enabled Google to collect, store and use personally identifiable location data when it was turned on, and that setting was turned on by default. > The Court also found that when consumers later accessed the ‘Location History’ setting on their Android device during the same time period to turn that setting off, they were also misled because Google did not inform them that by leaving the ‘Web & App Activity’ setting switched on, Google would continue to collect, store and use their personally identifiable location data.
- notRobot 6y ago
  Well, shit. I've definitely been misled by this exact thing. Fuck Google.
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    Fun fact: if you turn off "Web & App Activity" tracking, Google won't let you set a Home or Work address in Maps! https://twitter.com/jonathanmayer/status/1044300922149588993 https://twitter.com/jonathanmayer/status/1044300922149588993 https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3093979 https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3093979 > Fix problems with home and work in Maps > To use home and work when you search or use directions, you must turn on Web & App Activity. If can't find home and work in Maps, learn how to turn on Web & App Activity.
    - GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
      I was always annoyed by that, it feels like low level malicious compliance: “see? not storing anything, anything at all”
      - Cerium 6y ago
egberts1 6y ago
This article is not about chastising a data collector but about how ignorant a government can be in letting this go on ... unpunished.
- sldksk 6y ago
  If you think this is mere ignorance, I would suggest you are the ignorant party yourself.
- Khaine 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean since a government agency who is responsible for consumer competition and conduct took Google to court and won? They did their job. To challenge dodgy practices, and get courts to uphold the law. I'm not sure what else you want them to do.
random5634 6y ago
If you manage domains and force this stuff off your users will def complain. My worry is we end up w a situation such as cookie notices - users have gotten so used to clicking through content screens they don’t pay attention anymore because a lot of it is meaningless
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  >users have gotten so used to clicking through content screens they don’t pay attention anymore because a lot of it is meaningless I suspect the goal is to manufacture consent through inundation of fraudulent and coercive consent agreements.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    And the answer is increasingly to silence the question itself with ad blockers.
  - random5634 6y ago
    Actually many are required. I had a funny situation in person recently. This place had consent forms - lady checking folks in would offer to sign on your behalf. A few folks asked what it was - a consent form - oh sure, please sign for me. In gsuite I guess there are some settings that can impact things like location - people want recent locations to pop up etc I learned. So anytime you make 95 percent of users click through stuff they don’t care about - you start losing the battle here
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
      Consent forms force people into legally binding agreements, with massive power disparity, under duress. The consumer bears all the risk and the provider absolves themselves of any - unless one afford a lengthy court battle or join a class action. I suppose even more rarely a consumer can get, often fractional, relief through a government or consumer rights agency. EULAs, consent forms, and similar are a wholesale miscarriage of justice that causes incalculable irreparable harm to a staggering number of people every day. Think about it this way, a liability waiver at a doctors office is not dissimilar, in terms of bargaining ability, to an entry level employee's boss demanding sexual favors to keep their job. I have a broken arm, fix it, if the doctor screws up pay for all resulting costs forever. Justice, equality, and equity should never be limited to those with the most means. One last point to hopefully drive my point out of the park. Say I don't want to consent to gmails EULA, so I go and look into hosting my own webserver. Bad news, windows has a eula, okay I'll learn how to use Linux and FOSS software. But wait to need to connect my pc to the internet. I can't escape an internet providers take it or leave it eula. But I need email, I will get fired (lose everything in life) without it. So in effect I am forced, under duress, to 'consent' to a non-negotiable agreement that I reject with every fiber of my being so that I do not lose my home, family, and everything else.
4cao 6y ago
Ironically, the ACCC website also attempts to load a script from *.google-analytics.com.
williesleg 6y ago
Sounds like another pointless congressional hearing coming up.
amelius 6y ago
I'm guessing that a literal slap on the wrist of the CEO, executed by a random internet user would hurt more than the fine they would get for this.
- parhamn 6y ago
  People say this frequently. Is this true? I always assume the fine establishes the illegal behavior and awareness of it for both parties and Google would be forced to correct the behavior regardless of the fine's size. Were they to do it again or resume the behavior after the fine I assume the charges would escalate and eventually become criminal, hence companies curb their behaviors. While this does create a 'get fined first' mentality, it does mean that good regulating could curb bad behavior. Am I wrong?
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    "eventually become criminal" They've been breaking the law for over a decade, has abyonw gone to jail? And before someone says: "those instances were different law/etc", please remember that you will bot avoid jailtime if you rob the bank three different ways. Commiting crimes one after another makes sentences more aevere for an individual even if you broke totally different laws.
  - heymijo 6y ago
    Yes, recognizing fines as a cost of doing business is well recognized in corporate law. These legal scholars even hypothesize that there might not be a big enough fine to deter illegal behavior from corporations. [0] Your idea of escalating punishments doesn’t take into account corporate influence of legislation and regulatory capture. [0] https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2020/03/18/the-cost-of-doing-business-corporate-crime-and-punishment-post-crisis/ https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2020/03/18/the-cost-of-d...
    - amelius 6y ago
      The only punishment that works is to take away their brand. Which is also an appropriate punishment given that brands are about trust.
buggythebug 6y ago
In other news, shit stinks.
varispeed 6y ago
Google, Facebook and other companies, in my opinion, are allowed to continue ignoring the law, because they provide valuable information to various services. They are essentially an enormous network of unwilling spies / informants. If the data they (in my opinion) provide wasn't useful, they would have been shut down long time ago. Other thing is why even publish materials like this and what's the point of such commissions if they are toothless? Isn't that a massive waste of tax payer money? In many countries government creates various commissions to be able to give family members and associates well paid bogus jobs or pay for favours (if you vote for X, we will give a job to your wife's sister) and so on. Other reason is also to tick boxes - when asked by unscripted journalist about something, they can say look we care about this, we setup a commission...
- gatlin 6y ago
  It's definitely an artifact of my personality but I don't get the sense they are unwilling, though I imagine they would be coerced anyway and you could certainly start a discussion about how meaningful their consent would be in that context. I'm a broken record but the profit motive is what will always always always enable this: people depend on this machine for their livelihoods and are only personally responsible for a negligible, ignore-able portion of its activities. Path of least resistance in a world of friction is these companies will continue to act with an agenda even its employees might disagree with (if that isn't fault tolerance though idk what is!)
fblp 6y ago
I worked for the ACCC from 2008 and 2011. I'd like to share some more context on the ACCC and Australian legal system that may be of interest to HN readers. The ACCC is an independent authority empowered to enforce Australian Consumer Law (ACL) which contains consumer protection, completion product safety, anti-trust (competition) and other adjacent laws. It is most similar to the Federal Trade Commission in the US. The ACCC leadership are commissioners who are appointed based on input of federal and state governments. The appointments tend to be "non-partisan" with the current chair leading the organization for 10 years (with 3 term renewals under multiple governments). The ACCC has been taking action against Google since mid 2000s. The last case against Google that they won was in relation to consumers being misled about what were advertisements vs native results. [1] The main provision of law protecting Australian consumers that is invoked in these cases is s18 of Australian consumer law that states: "A person [or entity] must not, in trade or commerce, engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive." Laws with this wording have existed in Australia since the the 1970s. This law is enforced widely and there are also state agencies that enforce similar laws. All kinds of industries have received enforcement action ranging from retailers to supplement providers. As far as i know it's one of the but most broadly enforced consumer protection laws in any country. The ACCC won a case against Apple under this same law in 2018 for misleading consumers about their warranty rights after third party repairs were done. Apple was fined $9 million dollars. The action against Apple included 254 complaints from customers impacted. You can literally call or email the ACCC to log a complaint about any business and it will use this complaints to identify patterns of misconduct thst then enforce enforcement priorities. The ACL currently limits penalties to $10 million per contravention for corporations. Only parliament can increase thst limit amending legislation. Individuals can also be fiend up to $5million. Litigation is typically the last resort, and businesses have many oppurtunities to resolve or settle the matter. I am not in any way privy to this case, but typically a remediation action the ACCC seeks is notifying and posting notices that it engaged in misleading conduct, sometimes with a way for the consumer to seek a remedy. It's likely Google was not willing to do this without a fight. Individuals and businesses can also privately take action if they were misled or deceived. The Australian Court system that enforced this law is also relatively non-partisan. The australian government and judicial system was formed relatively recently - in the late 1800s and there was a strong intention to prevent political patronage in tbe public service and court system. [2] Australian Consumer law also has other specific protections that i like such as requiring businesses to make the price the consumer has to pay most prominent (as opposed to making the price exclusive of taxes and fees most prominent). The ACCC has just under 1000 employees and a small team would have worked on this case with support from outside lawyers. Congrats to them and hopefully this will encourage Google and other vendors to be more thoughtful about their data collection opt-ins. [1] https://www.australiancontractlaw.com/cases/google.html https://www.australiancontractlaw.com/cases/google.html [2] https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp0001/01RP07 https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...
shadowgovt 6y ago
Does anyone have a source for additional information on the mechanism by which Google is collecting location data when "Web & App Activity" is turned on? Is that permission giving access to the location API in the browser?
- bagacrap 6y ago
  this article from 2018 has a bit more detail. What it boils down to seems to be that if you use search or maps to look for something local, say a restaurant, Google will remember that in your search history, which connects you and your location. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-17/google-makes-changes-after-revelations-it-tracked-users/10131016 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-17/google-makes-changes-...
  - gman83 6y ago
    There's no way this is what this is about, no? This seems totally fine, whereas the article makes it seem like they were actively tracking your location while telling you they weren't. If this is it then I disagree completely with the ruling.
    - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
      The problem is that this wasn't the only way they were gathering this info, and that they misled consumers by allowing them to turn off a setting that supposedly stopped this kind of tracking, while still continuing to track due to a different setting defaulting to "on".
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      Did some digging. Details are a little fuzzy, but I think I see why the Australian courts had a problem with this. Here's one blog post that expands on the topic from a couple years back: https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/blog/the-right-to-not-be-tracked-a-spotlight-on-google-maps-and-android-location-tracking/ https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/blog/the-right-to-not-be-tracke... Google isn't just making an educated guess about where you are based on what you searched for... It's making an educated guess based upon what its servers are allowed to know about your query. It's unclear to me whether all the data Google collates is published anywhere public, but this includes things like originating IP address and headers sent in the request that can be inferred to be locale-relevant. For example, looking at my own search history, Google's real certain it knows when I'm doing queries from "home" (perhaps because I told it my home location in Maps and it's correlated requests from a specific IP address with that location, perhaps because Google's fabric is huge and it can disambiguate origin of request based on where the request enters the network, perhaps because I registered Google appliances at "home" that are on the same network). Key idea is: none of those are technically "Ask the device for its GPS state and cache it," so none of them are controlled by disabling Location History. If the Court is arguing "you can't claim you aren't tracking location by making 'location' a technical term and then combining several other pieces of state to estimate someone's geographic point of origin for a web request," I can see that argument.
sunsipples 6y ago
"The ACCC is seeking declarations, pecuniary penalties, publications orders, and compliance orders. This will be determined at a later date." pecuniary penalties differ from fines and depending on where they are taxable could be a deduction :/
therealbilly 6y ago
Google and FaceBook received funding from the US government in the early years of their existence. I think we all know why. All that information being collected was/is of massive importance.
FreezingKeeper 6y ago
:s/misled/lied to/g
fnord77 6y ago
quel choc

538 points by Khaine 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

And I'm guessing the fine will be something abysmally small. Fine them $5B: $2.5B in taxes (since they don't pay their fair share) and $2.5B in class action distributed to affected users. In 2020 they made $4.8B in revenue locally in Australia but ran most of that on the books through Singapore. Dodgy. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-18/google-pays-more-tax-but-still-makes-billions-in-singapore/12254448 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-18/google-pays-more-tax-... HN'rs will upvote posts/comments on Google taking away privacy. But mention that Google should be paying their fair share of tax in the country they extract those revenues from or be punished in proportion to their revenues for severe consumer rights violations... downvotes. Pathetic.

austhrow743 6y ago
There's no way we're worth $50B to them.
wisdomdata 6y ago
the question is, are the downvoters paid or incentivised to do so? we will never know.
mdoms 6y ago
You can't "fine" someone "tax". What does that even mean?

gigatexal 6y ago

Is anyone surprised?

Majestic121 6y ago
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26832412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26832412 Yes, I'm surprised that the "Web & App" permission also gives access to my location when there's another permission called "Location history". Are you not ?
- 1_person 6y ago
  I'm personally more annoyed that even with GPS disabled and denied to all applications Google Play Services enables it and samples the location randomly. It even brags on the status screen that it's doing it, like Google grabbing your lunch money and asking what you're going to do about it, punk?

izacus 6y ago

The important parts: > The Court ruled that when consumers created a new Google Account during the initial set-up process of their Android device, Google misrepresented that the ‘Location History’ setting was the only Google Account setting that affected whether Google collected, kept or used personally identifiable data about their location. In fact, another Google Account setting titled ‘Web & App Activity’ also enabled Google to collect, store and use personally identifiable location data when it was turned on, and that setting was turned on by default. > The Court also found that when consumers later accessed the ‘Location History’ setting on their Android device during the same time period to turn that setting off, they were also misled because Google did not inform them that by leaving the ‘Web & App Activity’ setting switched on, Google would continue to collect, store and use their personally identifiable location data.

notRobot 6y ago
Well, shit. I've definitely been misled by this exact thing. Fuck Google.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  Fun fact: if you turn off "Web & App Activity" tracking, Google won't let you set a Home or Work address in Maps! https://twitter.com/jonathanmayer/status/1044300922149588993 https://twitter.com/jonathanmayer/status/1044300922149588993 https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3093979 https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3093979 > Fix problems with home and work in Maps > To use home and work when you search or use directions, you must turn on Web & App Activity. If can't find home and work in Maps, learn how to turn on Web & App Activity.
  - GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
    I was always annoyed by that, it feels like low level malicious compliance: “see? not storing anything, anything at all”
    - Cerium 6y ago

egberts1 6y ago

This article is not about chastising a data collector but about how ignorant a government can be in letting this go on ... unpunished.

sldksk 6y ago
If you think this is mere ignorance, I would suggest you are the ignorant party yourself.
Khaine 6y ago
I'm not sure what you mean since a government agency who is responsible for consumer competition and conduct took Google to court and won? They did their job. To challenge dodgy practices, and get courts to uphold the law. I'm not sure what else you want them to do.

random5634 6y ago

If you manage domains and force this stuff off your users will def complain. My worry is we end up w a situation such as cookie notices - users have gotten so used to clicking through content screens they don’t pay attention anymore because a lot of it is meaningless

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
>users have gotten so used to clicking through content screens they don’t pay attention anymore because a lot of it is meaningless I suspect the goal is to manufacture consent through inundation of fraudulent and coercive consent agreements.
- nicbou 6y ago
  And the answer is increasingly to silence the question itself with ad blockers.
- random5634 6y ago
  Actually many are required. I had a funny situation in person recently. This place had consent forms - lady checking folks in would offer to sign on your behalf. A few folks asked what it was - a consent form - oh sure, please sign for me. In gsuite I guess there are some settings that can impact things like location - people want recent locations to pop up etc I learned. So anytime you make 95 percent of users click through stuff they don’t care about - you start losing the battle here
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    Consent forms force people into legally binding agreements, with massive power disparity, under duress. The consumer bears all the risk and the provider absolves themselves of any - unless one afford a lengthy court battle or join a class action. I suppose even more rarely a consumer can get, often fractional, relief through a government or consumer rights agency. EULAs, consent forms, and similar are a wholesale miscarriage of justice that causes incalculable irreparable harm to a staggering number of people every day. Think about it this way, a liability waiver at a doctors office is not dissimilar, in terms of bargaining ability, to an entry level employee's boss demanding sexual favors to keep their job. I have a broken arm, fix it, if the doctor screws up pay for all resulting costs forever. Justice, equality, and equity should never be limited to those with the most means. One last point to hopefully drive my point out of the park. Say I don't want to consent to gmails EULA, so I go and look into hosting my own webserver. Bad news, windows has a eula, okay I'll learn how to use Linux and FOSS software. But wait to need to connect my pc to the internet. I can't escape an internet providers take it or leave it eula. But I need email, I will get fired (lose everything in life) without it. So in effect I am forced, under duress, to 'consent' to a non-negotiable agreement that I reject with every fiber of my being so that I do not lose my home, family, and everything else.

4cao 6y ago

Ironically, the ACCC website also attempts to load a script from *.google-analytics.com.

williesleg 6y ago

Sounds like another pointless congressional hearing coming up.

amelius 6y ago

I'm guessing that a literal slap on the wrist of the CEO, executed by a random internet user would hurt more than the fine they would get for this.

parhamn 6y ago
People say this frequently. Is this true? I always assume the fine establishes the illegal behavior and awareness of it for both parties and Google would be forced to correct the behavior regardless of the fine's size. Were they to do it again or resume the behavior after the fine I assume the charges would escalate and eventually become criminal, hence companies curb their behaviors. While this does create a 'get fined first' mentality, it does mean that good regulating could curb bad behavior. Am I wrong?
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  "eventually become criminal" They've been breaking the law for over a decade, has abyonw gone to jail? And before someone says: "those instances were different law/etc", please remember that you will bot avoid jailtime if you rob the bank three different ways. Commiting crimes one after another makes sentences more aevere for an individual even if you broke totally different laws.
- heymijo 6y ago
  Yes, recognizing fines as a cost of doing business is well recognized in corporate law. These legal scholars even hypothesize that there might not be a big enough fine to deter illegal behavior from corporations. [0] Your idea of escalating punishments doesn’t take into account corporate influence of legislation and regulatory capture. [0] https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2020/03/18/the-cost-of-doing-business-corporate-crime-and-punishment-post-crisis/ https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2020/03/18/the-cost-of-d...
  - amelius 6y ago
    The only punishment that works is to take away their brand. Which is also an appropriate punishment given that brands are about trust.

buggythebug 6y ago

In other news, shit stinks.

varispeed 6y ago

Google, Facebook and other companies, in my opinion, are allowed to continue ignoring the law, because they provide valuable information to various services. They are essentially an enormous network of unwilling spies / informants. If the data they (in my opinion) provide wasn't useful, they would have been shut down long time ago. Other thing is why even publish materials like this and what's the point of such commissions if they are toothless? Isn't that a massive waste of tax payer money? In many countries government creates various commissions to be able to give family members and associates well paid bogus jobs or pay for favours (if you vote for X, we will give a job to your wife's sister) and so on. Other reason is also to tick boxes - when asked by unscripted journalist about something, they can say look we care about this, we setup a commission...

gatlin 6y ago
It's definitely an artifact of my personality but I don't get the sense they are unwilling, though I imagine they would be coerced anyway and you could certainly start a discussion about how meaningful their consent would be in that context. I'm a broken record but the profit motive is what will always always always enable this: people depend on this machine for their livelihoods and are only personally responsible for a negligible, ignore-able portion of its activities. Path of least resistance in a world of friction is these companies will continue to act with an agenda even its employees might disagree with (if that isn't fault tolerance though idk what is!)

fblp 6y ago

I worked for the ACCC from 2008 and 2011. I'd like to share some more context on the ACCC and Australian legal system that may be of interest to HN readers. The ACCC is an independent authority empowered to enforce Australian Consumer Law (ACL) which contains consumer protection, completion product safety, anti-trust (competition) and other adjacent laws. It is most similar to the Federal Trade Commission in the US. The ACCC leadership are commissioners who are appointed based on input of federal and state governments. The appointments tend to be "non-partisan" with the current chair leading the organization for 10 years (with 3 term renewals under multiple governments). The ACCC has been taking action against Google since mid 2000s. The last case against Google that they won was in relation to consumers being misled about what were advertisements vs native results. [1] The main provision of law protecting Australian consumers that is invoked in these cases is s18 of Australian consumer law that states: "A person [or entity] must not, in trade or commerce, engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive." Laws with this wording have existed in Australia since the the 1970s. This law is enforced widely and there are also state agencies that enforce similar laws. All kinds of industries have received enforcement action ranging from retailers to supplement providers. As far as i know it's one of the but most broadly enforced consumer protection laws in any country. The ACCC won a case against Apple under this same law in 2018 for misleading consumers about their warranty rights after third party repairs were done. Apple was fined $9 million dollars. The action against Apple included 254 complaints from customers impacted. You can literally call or email the ACCC to log a complaint about any business and it will use this complaints to identify patterns of misconduct thst then enforce enforcement priorities. The ACL currently limits penalties to $10 million per contravention for corporations. Only parliament can increase thst limit amending legislation. Individuals can also be fiend up to $5million. Litigation is typically the last resort, and businesses have many oppurtunities to resolve or settle the matter. I am not in any way privy to this case, but typically a remediation action the ACCC seeks is notifying and posting notices that it engaged in misleading conduct, sometimes with a way for the consumer to seek a remedy. It's likely Google was not willing to do this without a fight. Individuals and businesses can also privately take action if they were misled or deceived. The Australian Court system that enforced this law is also relatively non-partisan. The australian government and judicial system was formed relatively recently - in the late 1800s and there was a strong intention to prevent political patronage in tbe public service and court system. [2] Australian Consumer law also has other specific protections that i like such as requiring businesses to make the price the consumer has to pay most prominent (as opposed to making the price exclusive of taxes and fees most prominent). The ACCC has just under 1000 employees and a small team would have worked on this case with support from outside lawyers. Congrats to them and hopefully this will encourage Google and other vendors to be more thoughtful about their data collection opt-ins. [1] https://www.australiancontractlaw.com/cases/google.html https://www.australiancontractlaw.com/cases/google.html [2] https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp0001/01RP07 https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...

shadowgovt 6y ago

Does anyone have a source for additional information on the mechanism by which Google is collecting location data when "Web & App Activity" is turned on? Is that permission giving access to the location API in the browser?

bagacrap 6y ago
this article from 2018 has a bit more detail. What it boils down to seems to be that if you use search or maps to look for something local, say a restaurant, Google will remember that in your search history, which connects you and your location. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-17/google-makes-changes-after-revelations-it-tracked-users/10131016 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-17/google-makes-changes-...
- gman83 6y ago
  There's no way this is what this is about, no? This seems totally fine, whereas the article makes it seem like they were actively tracking your location while telling you they weren't. If this is it then I disagree completely with the ruling.
  - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
    The problem is that this wasn't the only way they were gathering this info, and that they misled consumers by allowing them to turn off a setting that supposedly stopped this kind of tracking, while still continuing to track due to a different setting defaulting to "on".
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Did some digging. Details are a little fuzzy, but I think I see why the Australian courts had a problem with this. Here's one blog post that expands on the topic from a couple years back: https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/blog/the-right-to-not-be-tracked-a-spotlight-on-google-maps-and-android-location-tracking/ https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/blog/the-right-to-not-be-tracke... Google isn't just making an educated guess about where you are based on what you searched for... It's making an educated guess based upon what its servers are allowed to know about your query. It's unclear to me whether all the data Google collates is published anywhere public, but this includes things like originating IP address and headers sent in the request that can be inferred to be locale-relevant. For example, looking at my own search history, Google's real certain it knows when I'm doing queries from "home" (perhaps because I told it my home location in Maps and it's correlated requests from a specific IP address with that location, perhaps because Google's fabric is huge and it can disambiguate origin of request based on where the request enters the network, perhaps because I registered Google appliances at "home" that are on the same network). Key idea is: none of those are technically "Ask the device for its GPS state and cache it," so none of them are controlled by disabling Location History. If the Court is arguing "you can't claim you aren't tracking location by making 'location' a technical term and then combining several other pieces of state to estimate someone's geographic point of origin for a web request," I can see that argument.

sunsipples 6y ago

"The ACCC is seeking declarations, pecuniary penalties, publications orders, and compliance orders. This will be determined at a later date." pecuniary penalties differ from fines and depending on where they are taxable could be a deduction :/

therealbilly 6y ago

Google and FaceBook received funding from the US government in the early years of their existence. I think we all know why. All that information being collected was/is of massive importance.

FreezingKeeper 6y ago

:s/misled/lied to/g

fnord77 6y ago

quel choc