Google Will Track Your Location ‘Every 15 Minutes’—‘Even With GPS Disabled’
If you’re worried your phone might be spying on you, sharing your data and location without you realizing, then a new report this week will make alarming reading.
“You can’t say no to Google’s surveillance,” the Cybernews research team warns, describing a secretive stream of data they say continually transmits from a new phone to Google’s servers. Even more “concerning,” they say, “the phone periodically attempts to download and run new code, potentially opening up security risks.”
The Cybernews team took a “brand-new [Pixel 9 pro XL] with a new Google account and default settings” and rooted it to enable a man-in-the-middle data interception. The team “proxied the inbound and outbound traffic and used a custom security certificate to decrypt and examine the communications,” albeit rooting the phone disabled some features and so the intercepted data was not complete.
Because the testing took place with a new, default account, the team did not test to see the effect that user changes to privacy and security settings might have. But just as we’ve seen with browsers and apps—given most users maintain broadly default settings, it’s imperative those offer a good degree of out of the box protection.
