Google tried to let phone makers hide privacy settings
News medium Insider reports based on published court documents that Google tried to convince smartphone makers and telcos to make privacy settings in Android more difficult to find, so that they would be used less.
According to Insider, which has sifted through recently revealed court documents from Arizona, Google found it “a problem” that users actually exploit Android’s privacy settings if they managed to find them. That’s why Google is said to have pushed popular privacy options deeper into the settings menu and also tried to persuade several phone manufacturers to follow suit. LG is mentioned by name as an example by the public prosecutor. However, the evidence on which this is based is not publicly available.
According to the indictment, Google further tried to convince manufacturers by “misrepresenting, disguising, suppressing and omitting” information about the use of privacy settings. That way, manufacturers would be reassured about the negative effects of making privacy settings more difficult to find. A higher location attach rate would be better for Google’s ad revenue.
Insider also takes a wide look at the Google employees who found the privacy settings themselves confusing. However, this was also apparent from other court documents, which were revealed in August of last year. At the time, a Google employee said “Speaking as a user, what? More specifically, I thought I had location tracking turned off on my phone. So our communication about this confuses even a privacy-focused Google engineer. That’s not good.”
A Google spokesperson has responded to The Verge. “The Arizona State Attorney and our competitors driving this lawsuit have done their best to mischaracterize our services. We have always built privacy features into our products and provided deep control over location data. We look forward to telling the true story .”
The state of Arizona sued Google last year. The prosecutor accuses Google of violating users’ privacy by collecting location data about them, even if they had turned that setting off.