[Software] Google has been accused of intentionally hiding privacy settings in the Google Maps application

[Angrry.exe™]

What many already suspected is confirmed by concrete evidence:

Google intentionally hid the privacy settings in the Google Maps application, and even tested several versions of the interface, selecting the one that complicates things the most for users.

Last year, Google was sued by Attorney General Arizona for allegations of illegal data collection about Android users, even though they had explicitly opted to block those practices by checking the relevant options in the relevant application settings. But according to recent evidence, as well as some testimonies from former employees of the company, Google intentionally (efforts to the point of de facto failure) made it difficult for users to increase their privacy by disabling some of the valuable monitoring tools, such as permanent harvesting of location coordinates.

• According to the evidence in court, Google continues to gather information through other means that facilitates the location of users of its products, thwarting their attempts to obtain a satisfactory level of anonymity.
• Thus, Google would deliberately defy the need for privacy of users, especially when using the Google Maps product.
• According to the allegations, Google has redesigned the Settings menu with the intention of making it difficult to discover the privacy settings, in the idea that as many users as possible will give up changing them, or possibly will not even know about their existence.
• Apparently, the Google design team would have gone through several variants of Google Maps interface, in the end being selected the least intuitive implementation on the Settings menu.
• According to the evidence in the file, Google believes that accessing privacy settings by too many users can be a problem, endangering the company's business based on collecting and capitalizing on as much information about them.
• Thus, the solution found was to obscure the relevant settings.
• Using a combination of data collected from basic use of Android phones, access to applications such as Google Maps, and even third-party services that constantly share information with Google, the company has been (and perhaps still is) able to build internally a user profile that includes key locations, such as home address and jobs.
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• At least one senior product manager claimed that he did not know how the various privacy settings that Google offered users to be personalized affect each other, and a former Google Maps vice president told investigators that the only way a the user could be sure that keeping their locations private would be intentionally lying about them by manually setting up fictitious locations.

  Google's "need" to discourage changing privacy settings has not stopped with its own services or devices, with the company putting pressure on LG and other smartphone makers to obscure settings that make it easier to block Google's monitoring.

  From Google's point of view, the deeper and wider the data collection, the more detailed and accurate the profile of individual users is. By extension, the better targeted and profitable are the ads displayed. That's not necessarily a bad thing (it's the mechanism that allows most Google products to be free), but it's easy to anticipate how easy and fast information gathering can take an ugly turn, becoming far too intrusive and with unpredictable privacy effects. of those subject to daily monitoring.