Anyone who owns an iPhone or Android phone and has turned off location tracking will be eligible to join a lawsuit that claims Google has created “near perfect surveillance” — if a judge grants class-action status.
The Mountain View search and digital advertising giant is in hot water over revelations that it continues to track users who turn off the location-history function on their mobile phones.
“A cell phone faithfully follows its owner beyond public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales,” the lawsuit said, quoting U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts from a recent phone-privacy decision.
A third party getting access to individuals’ location histories via mobile phones “achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user,” the suit continued, again quoting Roberts. The suit was filed by Napoleon Patacsil, a San Diego man who said he has owned both an iPhone and an Android phone, and turned off location history on both devices
Google deceived users, the suit claims. Until an Associated Press report blew the lid off Google’s alleged surreptitious tracking, the company’s support page said, “With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored,” the lawsuit said, echoing the AP report.
However, turning location history off “only stopped Google from creating a location timeline that the user could view,” said the suit, which was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
“Google, however, continues to track the phone owners and keep a record of their locations. A user’s location is stored every time she uses any of the myriad additional Google-controlled features on her mobile phone, including … the Google Maps app, weather apps, and searches made with the phone’s mobile browser.”
Google did not immediately answer questions about the lawsuit’s claims.
After the AP report, Google initially argued that it provided “clear descriptions” of its tracking tools. But the firm soon removed from the support page the statement that turning off location history meant a user’s location wasn’t stored, and added material to inform users that after that tracking function is turned off, “some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other services, like Search and Maps,” the lawsuit said.
The suit invoked the Federal Trade Commission, suggesting Google’s user tracking was the same sort of behavior that drew a $1 million penalty from the agency against a mobile-advertising company.
“The activities engaged in by Google, detailed in this complaint, mirror location tracking activities condemned and sanctioned by the FTC,” the suit said.
In 2011, the agency, after accusing Google of misrepresenting the ways it shared users’ personal data, slapped the company with an order requiring it to inform users about how it uses their personal data. The following year Google agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle FTC charges that “for several months in 2011 and 2012, Google placed a certain advertising tracking cookie on the computers of Safari users who visited sites within Google’s DoubleClick advertising network, although Google had previously told these users they would automatically be opted out of such tracking, as a result of the default settings of the Safari browser used in Macs, iPhones and iPads.”