Google collects cell tower info even if location services are disabled
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Re: Google collects cell tower info even if location services are disabled
#2Figured they would do this and then hide it in Android OS/System so users don't know it was Google's own services draining their battery life the whole time.
If only they'd use this data to at least do something useful, like create a machine learning-enabled firewall to block "rogue" cell towers like cell site simulators. But no, of course not, it has to be done only for ads...
Re: Google collects cell tower info even if location services are disabled
#3I am running Android 7.1.2. I remember in the older versions of android, when you turned off the GPS, it would have to manually sync the receiver and it would take minutes to get GPS lock. In the current version, when I turned off location services, there is no "dot" indicating your location on Google Maps, but it appears almost instantly when you turn it off. I have long suspected that Android has the "coarse location" and "GPS location" always tracking, but merely just does not give Apps the data until location services is turned on.
Re: Google collects cell tower info even if location services are disabled
#4Figured they would do this and then hide it in Android OS/System so users don't know it was Google's own services draining their battery life the whole time. If only they'd use this data to at least do something useful, like create a machine learning-enabled firewall to block "rogue" cell towers like cell site simulators. But no, of course not, it has to be done only for ads...
Where does it say it's for ads? The article says the data was dropped on the floor.
Re: Google collects cell tower info even if location services are disabled
#5Question:
If I want Android without google services, what options do I have? So far I know only cheap chinese phones and F-Droid app store.
Re: Google collects cell tower info even if location services are disabled
#6Certain options should be hardware disable-able and this is one of them.
Re: Google collects cell tower info even if location services are disabled
#7Question: If I want Android without google services, what options do I have? So far I know only cheap chinese phones and F-Droid app store.
LineageOS, the successor to Cyanogenmod, runs on a lot of devices and doesn't have the Google services installed.
There's also a fork with replacements for some of the Google services: https://lineage.microg.org/
Re: Google collects cell tower info even if location services are disabled
#8I am running Android 7.1.2. I remember in the older versions of android, when you turned off the GPS, it would have to manually sync the receiver and it would take minutes to get GPS lock. In the current version, when I turned off location services, there is no "dot" indicating your location on Google Maps, but it appears almost instantly when you turn it off. I have long suspected that Android has the "coarse locati…
There are other strategies for getting a lock faster. Most of the slowness for a cold start with a modern receiver is receiving the ephemeris data (i.e. where the satellites are at the moment), which is transmitted at a whopping 50 bits per second, and so takes about 30 seconds to receive. Once you have that, the rest comes quickly. Older receivers with less computational power and less clever techniques could take a long time to work out your position after that, but modern ones can do it pretty much right away as long as the signal strength isn't crap.
That ephemeris data is good for 2-4 hours, so one simple technique to improve lock times is to save it, and then if you turn the receiver back on within that window, you can reacquire a lock almost instantly using the saved ephemeris data.
Another technique is to download the ephemeris data from a source that can provide it more quickly, such as the cell network. This skips that long transmission at 50bps from the satellites themselves. Pretty much any GPS chip in a cell phone these days will do this. This is called assisted GPS, or A-GPS. (This is not to be confused with another technique also called A-GPS, where the GPS chip captures the signal and sends it to the cell tower to offload the computation. This was a popular approach in older phones to comply with 911 reporting requirements, but doing the computations onboard is cheap now.)
Starting with a coarse guess of your location can also help shorten the time to initial lock, although it should be fairly short regardless. That guess can come from looking at cell signals along with known cell tower locations, and a rough altitude estimate can be made from the device's barometer.
All of which is to say, getting a dot almost instantly when you turn on location services doesn't necessarily mean too much here.
Re: Google collects cell tower info even if location services are disabled
#9Question: If I want Android without google services, what options do I have? So far I know only cheap chinese phones and F-Droid app store.
Many of the custom images you can find on XDA Developers do not require that you install Google Play Services.
CopperheadOS is a good choice if security is a priority.
If you need proprietary apps without using Google, you can install and use Amazon's app store app, and download them from there instead.
Re: Google collects cell tower info even if location services are disabled
#10I am running Android 7.1.2. I remember in the older versions of android, when you turned off the GPS, it would have to manually sync the receiver and it would take minutes to get GPS lock. In the current version, when I turned off location services, there is no "dot" indicating your location on Google Maps, but it appears almost instantly when you turn it off. I have long suspected that Android has the "coarse locati…
This is a fair description. Google would never exempt itself from info gathering. It's their platform, after all.