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Recently unredacted documents in a lawsuit against Google reveal that the company's own executives and employees knew how difficult the tech giant makes it for smartphone users to keep their location data private.
The aggressive collection of location data by Google and the difficulty for users to manage their privacy settings was known as problems by Google employees, lawsuit documents read, with employees declaring "Apple is eating our lunch." Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich sued Google in May 2020 over the tracking practices of Android, with the accusation that Google continued to collect location data from smartphones despite users opting out.
On May 18, Patently Apple posted a report titled "At Google I/O, the company attempted to Blur the Line with Apple on the Issue of user Privacy." In an 8-minute segment on 'Privacy by Design,' Google's Jen Fitzpatrick, SVP Google Maps, walked through Google's commitment to privacy on multiple levels. At the time, I had found their message perplexing as it contradicted what has been known and written about by many over the years. Now a new report reveals court documents that contradict Google's shiny new privacy message.
The aggressive collection of location data by Google and the difficulty for users to manage their privacy settings was known as problems by Google employees, lawsuit documents read, with employees declaring "Apple is eating our lunch."
Google has been adding various privacy improvements to its services and apps in the past few years, but it wasn’t solely out of its own volition. Google’s own privacy-infringing problems forced the company to reconsider some of its practices. Then there’s Apple’s massive interest in security and privacy that forced Google to come up with