| HN Mirror

Here's a good resource:

https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DC...

If you read through here, you'll get a sense for the various different IDs and tracking methods that Google is using. It's more than just the Advertising ID.

You'll also get a sense for the collection Google does about your environment. (nearby wifi, GPS position, etc.) And more troublingly, the fact that these services still collect data even when the user sets them to "off." A couple excerpts:

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"It’s hard for an Android mobile user to “opt out” of location tracking. For example, on an Android device, even if a user turns off the Wi-Fi, the device’s location is still tracked via its Wi-Fi signal. To prevent such tracking,Wi-Fi scanning must be explicitly disabled in a separate user action, as shown in Figure 4."

"Google can ascertain with a high degree of confidence whether a user is still, walking, running, bicycling, or riding on a train or a car. It achieves this by tracking an Android mobile user’s location coordinates at frequent time intervals in combination with the data from onboard sensors (such as an accelerometer)on mobile phones.Figure 5 shows an example of such data communicated with the Google servers while the user was walking."

"Google records the time and GPS coordinates for every photo taken."

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Anyhow, the fact is that much of this data is collected whether the user is accessing the phone, or not.

It's a bit complicated, and disabling the Advertising ID may limit some tracking in a few cases, but despite this extraordinarily prolific tracking is still occurring. There's a lot more detail in the document and frankly, it feels a lot like Facebook's privacy invasion in that:

- It's possible to mitigate some of the tracking, although this is intentionally made unintuitive the user.

- Conversely, the user will never be able to prevent a large portion of the tracking, and will have no intuitive sense of what is being collected by google at any different time, and;

- The default values and the data tracked will change over time, and the user will have to try to stay educated with every update about what has changed.

[edit]

Another decent resource:

https://www.apnews.com/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb

"An AP investigation found that Google saves your location history even if you’ve paused “Location History” on mobile devices. This map shows where Princeton privacy researcher Gunes Acar travelled over several days, from data saved to his Google account despite “Location History” being off."