What is the essence of the conflict?
Google continued to collect location data even when users turned off
Jack Menzel, former vice president in charge ofGoogle Maps, admitted during testimony that the only way to prevent Google from determining the location of a user's home and work is to specifically set the wrong locations immediately after the first launch of the program.
According to the docs, Jen Chai, senior managerGoogle's location services product did not know how the company's complex network of privacy settings interacted with each other.
Эти документы являются частью иска, поданного against Google by the Arizona attorney general last year, which accused the company of illegally collecting location data from smartphone users even after they refused.
The company was brought against the company in 2020 on the initiativethe Arizona Attorney General's Office, which accused the company of illegally collecting user location data even after this feature was disabled on the phone.
What new data has become known from the documents in the lawsuit against Google?
New documents to the lawsuit have made it clearer how Google has hidden its methods of collecting data, confusing not only its users, but also its own employees.
According to the documents, Google uses variousways to collect user location data, including Wi-Fi and even third-party apps not affiliated with Google. This is how the company forces users to share their data at any cost.
So there is no way to communicate your location data bypassing Google?
Google employee
Google hid privacy settings on purpose
When Google tested versions of itsAndroid operating system, which made it easier to find privacy settings, users began to massively hide their data. Internal company documents call this trend a problem. To solve it, the company tried to hide all data about privacy settings deeper.
Google has also tried to convince smartphone manufacturers to hide settings
Pressure on other companies
Google put pressure on LG and otherssmartphone manufacturers to make location settings that were popular among users difficult to access “by actively distorting <…>, hiding or suppressing facts.”
Position Google
Google spokesman Jose Castaneda saidAccording to The Verge, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and competitors in the lawsuit "have gone out of their way to misrepresent our services."
How is the case against Google developing?
- Illegal data collection
Published documents are partlawsuit between Google and the state of Arizona. Earlier, in May 2020, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed a lawsuit, accusing Google of illegally collecting information about the location of users.
The case against Google was opened in 2020 byan initiative of the Arizona Attorney General's Office. A similar lawsuit was filed by Boies Schiller Flexner. According to the firm, Google illegally collected user data even when they turned off the relevant features in their accounts. At the time, the charges were related to violations of federal wiretapping law and California's privacy law.
According to Arizona Attorney General MarkBrnović, the company collected information even when the location tracking function was deactivated. The plaintiff accuses the company of cheating consumers, which, according to Arizona law, could face a fine of up to $ 10,000.
As the agency points out, this claim is partiallyis the result of a 2018 investigation into Google that was initiated following an Associated Press note. The article argued that when the tracking function was disabled, some applications automatically saved the location data of the gadget carrier with a time stamp.
- Opt out of cookies
In January 2020, Google announced its planson the phase-out of support for third-party cookies in Chrome over the next two years. By 2022, the browser will take the step that other browsers like Safari and Firefox took years ago.
However, everything is not so simple. Third-party cookies are used by advertising companies to track a user's online behavior, create a user profile, and predict their interests based on the sites they visit. This data is used to send personalized advertising.
Google's cookies are in the millionswebsites, supplying the company with tons of information about the sites they visit - this is part of its huge advertising business. However, these days, the public is becoming more aware of privacy issues.
This is where the federal government comes in.cohort-based training (FLoC), which Google says is a privacy-focused advertising technology. With FLoC, Chrome will track the browsing habits of users on different web pages and then place them in different audiences or "cohorts" based on the data. Advertisers will then target their ads to specific cohorts rather than an individual user.
So Google will still bewill technically serve targeted advertisements to the user, but will do so in a more anonymous way. Google claims businesses can get almost the same ROI on advertising from FLoC as they can with cookie-based tracking.
How can I stop Google from tracking me?
- Advertising
You can enable or disable advertising,based on your interests in the link. You can disable “ad personalization” using the “On” slider. - off.” After this, Google will no longer study your interests for advertising, and you will no longer see personalized ads.
- Websites
You can also deny deny collectiondata about visited sites. Click the link to uncheck the box next to "Add Chrome history, as well as data on actions in applications and sites using Google services" so that the corporation does not use information about which sites you visited in the browser.
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