Four US citizens have filed a class action lawsuit against Google for using their cellular data for "passive transfers of information." The lawsuit is filed in California district court alleging that Google consumed expensive cellular data without the user's consent. It also accuses the Mountain View giant of deliberately designing its applications to use cellular data without the user being able to choose to disable them.
The company has recently been criticized for promoting its own apps using the Android ecosystem. It happens to such an extent that no company uses a bare Android operating system without Google's mobile services. While privacy is a long-debated issue in the Android world, passive information transfers generally go unnoticed.
Google uses cellular data without consent
One of the main allegations of the complaint is that none of the company policies inform the user that their cellular data will be used in the background. The plaintiff's lawyer tested the allegations on a new Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphone, which recorded passive data transmission 389 times in 24 hours. All of this data was transmitted between Google and the phone, consuming 8.8MB / day.
He says the exchange mainly consisted of LOG files which are automatically generated and contain basic information such as open applications, available networks and system metrics. According to the complaint, these are not urgent files and their transmission could wait until the phone is connected to WiFi. Instead, Android chooses to use expensive cellular data, which costs US $ 8 / GB to transfer.
To go further, the complaint also mentions a Google Data Collection study carried out in 2018 by Professor Douglas C. Schmidt. The study found that Android and Chrome passed data to Google "even without any user interaction." The volume of these transfers is more worrying because Chrome only transmitted 38 times / hour. Not only that, the study found that most of the data exchange was related to Double Click, AdWords (now Google Ads) and Google Analytics. Simply put, Google takes your data without your permission and makes money for it.
While we can put privacy and data usage aside, battery usage should also be of concern. Ideally, if your phone is idle, it should be idle. However, with Google recovering data in the absence of a WiFi network, it's not just a dent in your data plan, but also in your phone's battery. You can fix the hole by turning off mobile data, but that's not the solution.
Source: The register
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