Google Hit With Lawsuit Over Alleged Location Tracking Scandal

A new lawsuit puts Google in the crosshairs of the tech world’s latest privacy scandal. A complaint filed over the weekend in San Francisco federal court accused the search engine and mobile operating system giant of illicitly tracking the locations of mobile users, even when said users manually turned off location tracking, according to Reuters.

The Associated Press first shone a spotlight on the issue last week in an extensive investigative report. Users of Google apps on both iOS and Android mobile devices, unbeknownst to them, give a great deal of location data to Google just by using those apps. It is possible to go in and turn off a setting called “Location History,” but the AP’s report found that doing so did not actually stop Google from tracking users and storing that information.

Instead, the AP advised users to turn off a setting called “Web & App Activity,” which apparently did more location tracking than “Location History.” The misleading nature of these settings is the basis for the lawsuit. Plaintiff Napoleon Patacsil of San Diego wants it to be a class-action lawsuit representing anyone in the United States who turned the setting off but still had their locations tracked.

“Google represented that a user ‘can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.’ This simply was not true,” Patacsil’s complaint said, per Reuters.

Google has run into trouble with the “Location History” setting before. In 2017, a Quartz investigation found that the Mountain View, California-based tech firm still tracked user locations through their proximity to cell towers, even when the setting was turned off.

The privacy concerns are significant if Google collected as much location data as the AP report and Patacsil’s complaint alleged. The AP report included data from a Princeton University researcher who studied what his Android phone collected while “Location History” was turned off. Even with the setting switched off, the phone tracked all of his movements, including pinpointing his home address.

The idea, according to critics, is to use location data to better serve personalized advertisements to users. If Google knows where someone has been, the company’s ad service can give more specific recommendations of businesses to visit.