Google Android operating system has been tracking smart phones via cell phone towers. This has been occurring since early January of two thousand seventeen. What makes this even more perplexing is that Google Android operating system users with location services disabled, have been tracked as well.
As a matter of fact even individuals with Google Android operating system devices without Subscriber Identification Module installed. Your location information has been sent back to Google servers. You must have an Internet connection for this to occur.
Local cell phone tower data has been transmitted back to Google since early January of two thousand seventeen. Individuals at Google have admitted this practice. They claim that this practice of collecting cell tower location data will stop by the end of this month.
“In January of this year, we began looking into using Cell ID codes as an additional signal to further improve the speed and performance of message delivery. However, we never incorporated Cell ID into our network sync system, so that data was immediately discarded, and we updated it to no longer request Cell ID.”Google Spokesperson
Why would gathering location information via local cell phone towers improve speed and performance of message delivery? Google did NOT notify any of their device users, including myself, that this type of data was collected. I happen to have an HTC 626s Desire Android running marshmallow operating system.
Individuals at Google claim that this company does not use this data for their own purposes. Even if you were to restore your Google Android operating system back to factory, this data would be sent back to Google. As of this blog post creation, there is no way to disable this feature, until Google shuts off this data collection later this month.
For now, you have to disable Wifi so that no data is sent back to Google headquarters. Also, you could power off your Google Android device, and then take out the battery. Since Google failed to notify anyone of this data collection you were not allowed to opt out of this practice.