“Google tried to allow phone makers to hide privacy settings” – IT Pro – News

Insider news outlet, based on published court documents, suggests that Google has tried to convince smartphone makers and carriers to make Android’s privacy settings more difficult to find, so that they are used less often.

According to InsiderThis recently Disclosure of court documents From Arizona, Google found it a “problem” that users would actually take advantage of Android’s privacy settings if they could find it. That’s why Google is said to have put popular privacy options deeper into the settings menu and also tried to convince several phone manufacturers to do the same. LG was mentioned by name by Attorney General as an example. However, the evidence on which this is based is not public.

According to the indictment, Google also tried to persuade the manufacturers by “misrepresenting, hiding, suppressing, and deleting information about the use of privacy settings.” This way, manufacturers will be reassured about the downsides of making privacy settings more difficult to find. Top Website attachment rate It will be better for Google ads revenue.

Insider also broadly measures Google employees who find the privacy settings themselves confusing. Which However, it turns out, too From other court documents, it was revealed in August of last year. At the time, a Google employee said, “Speaking as a user, what? More specifically, I thought location tracking on my phone was turned off. So our communications about this are confusing even a privacy-focused Google engineer. That’s not good.”

A Google spokesperson has Across the edge Answered. “The Arizona attorney general and our competitors leading this lawsuit have done their best to misrepresent 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.”

Arizona State drag Google was brought to court last year. The prosecutor accused Google of violating users’ privacy by collecting location data about them, even if they turned this setting off.