News medium Insider reports on the basis of published court documents that Google tried to convince smartphone makers and Telco’s to make privacy settings in Android more difficult to find, so that they would be used less.
According to Insider, which scoured recently revealed court documents from Arizona, Google found it “a problem” that users actually exploited Android’s privacy settings if they managed to find it. That’s why Google is said to have put popular privacy options deeper into the settings menu and also tried to persuade several phone manufacturers to follow suit. LG is mentioned by name by the public prosecutor as an example. However, the evidence on which that is based is not public.
According to the indictment, Google further tried to convince manufacturers by “misrepresenting, disguising, suppressing, and omitting information about the use of privacy settings.” That way, manufacturers would be reassured about the negative effects of making privacy settings more difficult to find. A higher location attach rate would be better for Google’s ad revenue.
Insider also measures broadly about the Google employees who found the privacy settings themselves confusing. However , this was also evident from other court documents, which were revealed in August of last year. At the time, a Google employee said, “Speaking as a user, what? More specifically, I thought I had location tracking turned off on my phone. So our communication about this confuses even a privacy-focused Google engineer. That’s not good.”
A Google spokesperson has responded to The Verge . “The Arizona prosecutor and our competitors driving this lawsuit have done their best to mis characterize our services. We have always built privacy features into our products and provided deep control over location data. We look forward to telling the true story. . ”
The Arizona trailed Google last year to justice. The prosecutor has accused Google of violating users’ privacy by collecting location data about them, even if they turned off that setting.
