14 DAY TRIAL // According to court filings unsealed earlier this week, Google made location settings harder to locate in its Android phone software so customers would not turn them off, a move intended at sustaining the data collecting operations that power the Internet giant's lucrative ad business.
According to the documents, the decision was made after Google conducted an investigation that found a significant increase in devices disabling the settings despite offering them readily available options. The search giant saw the change as a problem and urged other Android phone manufacturers to do the same.
The documents are part of a consumer fraud lawsuit filed against Google by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich last year. The Arizona Mirror was the first to report on the unsealed documents.
An unredacted passage from the lawsuit notes "At bottom, Google's efforts were intended to deemphasize the prominence of location settings because Google's own research showed that users are more likely to disable location settings when presented with a clear option to do so".
"Google tried to convince these carriers and manufacturers to conceal the location settings — or make them less prominent — through active misrepresentations and/or concealment, suppression, or omission of facts available to Google concerning user experience in order to assuage their privacy concerns".
Google did not immediately respond to a comment request
According to the lawsuit, one of the manufacturers Google effectively badgered was LG, that moved the location toggle to the second page of settings. LG did not respond quickly to a request for comment.
The lawsuit was brought in response to a 2018 Associated Press investigation into Google's location data practices on phones running Android. According to the news website, Google still tracks people's location even if they turn off a setting called Location History.
When that setting is disabled, the company still tracks where users go, but the app won't record the places they've been in their Google Maps timelines, according to the study. Users can, however, disable location tracking by turning off another feature known as Web and Apps Activity.
The vast majority of Google's revenue comes from its large advertising business, that is supported by personal information collected when people use its products. However, consumers were "lulled into a false sense of security" because Google tricked users into thinking they had stopped location data collection options when they were still enabled, Brnovich noted on Twitter when the complaint was first filed.