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Fearing data privacy issues, Google cuts some Android phone data for carriers

reuters.com

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Re: Fearing data privacy issues, Google cuts some Android phone data for carriers

#21

Post by lloeki »

PeterisP wrote: post #8
makomk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This effectively provided carriers with aggregated, deidentified information about people's locations. It's easy to see from the problems with things like Strava's heatmaps just how much of a privacy headache this could be and how hard it would be to ensure that nothing sensitive leaked out. Also, even if they did people are sensitive enough about privacy that with the right spin it could be turned into a muck-raking…

If you're a carrier then you can do coarse-grained detection of everyone's location by timing-based triangulation - modern cell phone standards require knowing your distance from the cell tower (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_advance for example) so it's measured (and thus can be recorded if the carrier wants) as part of every keepalive connection and if you're in range for more than one tower, which is alm…

> Distance

Don’t modern cell towers use beamforming? In which case they get direction as well as RTT, so triangulation is not even needed (although it makes location more precise)

Re: Fearing data privacy issues, Google cuts some Android phone data for carriers

#22

Post by PeterisP »

liability wrote: post #12
PeterisP wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a carrier then you can do coarse-grained detection of everyone's location by timing-based triangulation - modern cell phone standards require knowing your distance from the cell tower (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_advance for example) so it's measured (and thus can be recorded if the carrier wants) as part of every keepalive connection and if you're in range for more than one tower, which is alm…

I wager that coarse-grain location data is not so coarse these days. My carrier seems to know the instant I crossed a border for instance, sending me a text message about it within seconds. Years ago people used to get nailed with roaming charges simply because they were near a border and happened to accidentally get connected to a tower across the border, but that's not happening anymore. Their system knows enough a…

By course-grained I mean 0.5-1 km; which is very inaccurate compared to GPS accuracy (and isn't sufficient to tell which shop you're visiting, which has commercial value in sale of location data) but is accurate enough to tell which side of the border you're on, or which mall you're visiting, or when you're home or at work and when somewhere else.

Re: Fearing data privacy issues, Google cuts some Android phone data for carriers

#23

Post by taneq »

makomk wrote: post #4
mehrdadn wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy the "privacy concern" excuse for this one at all. It almost feels like something one would do purely to spite or trick the regulators and/or consumers for caring about privacy.

This effectively provided carriers with aggregated, deidentified information about people's locations. It's easy to see from the problems with things like Strava's heatmaps just how much of a privacy headache this could be and how hard it would be to ensure that nothing sensitive leaked out. Also, even if they did people are sensitive enough about privacy that with the right spin it could be turned into a muck-raking…

If they're so concerned about peoples' privacy, perhaps they could disable their own non-aggregated, individually recorded, indefinitely-retained, fine-grained, timestamped GPS data collection?

Of course, their definition of 'privacy' is 'making sure nobody but Google gets your data' so they wouldn't see any need to do so.

Re: Fearing data privacy issues, Google cuts some Android phone data for carriers

#24

Post by PeterisP »

lloeki wrote: post #21
PeterisP wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a carrier then you can do coarse-grained detection of everyone's location by timing-based triangulation - modern cell phone standards require knowing your distance from the cell tower (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_advance for example) so it's measured (and thus can be recorded if the carrier wants) as part of every keepalive connection and if you're in range for more than one tower, which is alm…

> Distance Don’t modern cell towers use beamforming? In which case they get direction as well as RTT, so triangulation is not even needed (although it makes location more precise)

I may be wrong, but I think that at least the vast majority current widely depoyed systems don't use beamforming, it seems more of a "here's a tech demo that we're going to roll out soon with 5G" thing.

However, it's a bit the opposite way around - it's not that they can use beamforming to get direction, but it's that they need to know the location before they can use beamforming - so the protocol (5g?) needs to require the device to know or obtain its location, and send it to the cell tower so that it can apply beamforming; similar to how in 3g the protocol includes measurements and adjustments of the timing advance so that the distance can be used when actually transmitting data. So it would be essentially like "the phone can't turn off GPS or transmitting it to everyone, because it needs it for the radio to work".

Re: Fearing data privacy issues, Google cuts some Android phone data for carriers

#25

Post by xg15 »

bmdavi3 wrote: post #5
mehrdadn wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy the "privacy concern" excuse for this one at all. It almost feels like something one would do purely to spite or trick the regulators and/or consumers for caring about privacy.

Between the Nest cam recording light becoming "always on" and this, it's like they've been brainstorming ways to be "pro-privacy" with the caveat that it can't affect the data they collect. We'll probably see another one next week.

Not sure if intentional but both moves also seem rather passive-aggressive - i.e., they both affect relatively uncontroversial data uses that might cause noticeable problems for end-users when affected.

E.g., they make a camera designed for surveillance helpfully indicate to any burglars whether or not the owner might be watching them - but they don't change the actual capabilities of Google to watch.

They turning of location sharing for one feature that people would probably agree to share statistics with but keep the personal location history every android user gets by default untouched.

Re: Fearing data privacy issues, Google cuts some Android phone data for carriers

#27

Post by stiray »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

This actually seems like useful data that actually can be used to make the lives of the consumer (as opposed to the advertiser) better. It would be great if Google would open this up and make it available publicly, so we could have good data on what carrier has coverage where. Having it available publicly, I think, would also spur carriers to increase their data coverage.

In the first place google shouldnt even have those data. And I would place my bet they have removed this access so they can easyer say that they dont have location tracking data. Those are a bit problematic as from your movement you can be personally identified even without any additional identifiers. Which puts them under PII category.

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01376

Re: Fearing data privacy issues, Google cuts some Android phone data for carriers

#28

Post by ggg3 »

real reason for this is that the current advertising trend is "POI targeting".

google and other advertising companies (sometimes owned by telco, such as verizon-aol) allow clients to target users if they are near a starbucks or whatever.

this data now has a price in the market. my bet is that it had zero concern for users as the real motive.

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