Google tries to convince people they don’t know where you are
Published on November 30th, 2007 in gps navigation, tracking
Barry Schnitt, Google’s spokesperson responded to a discussion on Bits blog ran by The New York Times when the author used the word “secretly” to describe how Google figured the locations of cell towers:
Google figures out which cell towers are where by secretly enlisting the help of a million of its mobile maps users who happen to have phones with built-in GPS devices that are not locked by the carriers (that means no one who uses Verizon). These phones have been reporting to Google where they are, based on the GPS data and what cell tower they are connected to.
Barry Schnitt then tried to explain that this was in Google Mobile Privacy Policy so it would be better to reword it:
Thus, I think “secretly” is an overstatement. If you want to say “without proactively notifying users” to make a similar point, that would be much more accurate.
He also said Google does not have a way of connecting a mobile device’s unique ID to its user:
We don’t actually know who the person is or reliably where the phone is. We know that specific queries where the map is centered have come from a unique id number… …From our logs, we are not able to distinguish these three very common use cases. Also, users have the ability to re-set the unique client id number as often as they would like. Finally, we do not know who “you” are and don’t have any way of finding out. There is no name, phone number, address, email or account login associated with this information.
Check out the blog post for the whole article and other people’s comments.
Thanks Dave.
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