Tag Archives: location

android, google, honor, huawei, tech

Location Services: GPS-only no longer protects your privacy on Android 9 “Pie”, Huawei / Honor 10

4 Comments

I have an Honor 10 AI phone (among others) and this recently upgraded itself to Android 9 “Pie”. It is always good to be on the latest Android; but I noticed a change in something I care about (though acknowledging that for most people it is not top of mind).

Specifically, I am averse to sharing my location more than is necessary, especially with large organizations that want to track me for advertising and marketing purposes (hello Google!). Therefore I normally set Android Location Services to GPS-only. This means you do not have to agree to send your location data to Google in the dialog that appears when you turn on what Google calls “High Accuracy” location services. Here is what the setting looks like in Android 7:

image

I have found that Google Maps works badly on GPS-only, but other mapping apps like HERE WeGo work fine.

However, following the upgrade to Android 9 on the Honor 10 AI, my use of HERE WeGo was blocked.

image

This is coercive, in that mapping is a core function of a smartphone. And it is unnecessary, since I know for sure that this app works fine without the Wi-Fi scanning and Google data collection referenced in the dialog.

I agreed the setting but noticed another curious thing. When you switch on location services, you also make a new agreement with Huawei:

image

This is confusing. Is location services provided by Google, or Huawei?

Note also that I have little confidence in the promise that no “personal information” will be collected. The intention may be there, but history suggests that it is often pretty easy to identify the person from so-called non-personal information. It is better not to send the data at all if you care about privacy.

Huawei’s only suggestion if you do not agree is not to use location services. Or throw your device in the bin.

Having agreed all this data collection, note that you can still turn off wi-fi scanning and Bluetooth scanning in the advanced settings of Google location services. Is this respected though by Huawei? It is hard to tell.

Finally, note that Google now strongly encourages developers to use the Google Play location API rather than the Android location API.

image

This all seems like bad news if, like me, you want to minimize the location data that you share.

google, Web

Google Plus demands your location on iPhone, iPad and mobile devices – but you still have control

3 Comments

Last week I signed up for Google + (you can find me here), and one of first things I tried was to sign in on an Apple iPad.

I was annoyed to see the following message:

image

Google demanded the right to use my location with Google Plus, otherwise it would not let me sign in. But what if you want to use Google Plus without sharing your location with the world? Since Google Plus works fine on desktop PCs without location information, why should you not use it on an iPad in the same way?

This led me to investigate the W3C Geolocation API. In fact, I wrote my own web page to test how it works. I went over to Bing Maps, signed up for a developer account, and wrote a small amount of JavaScript to test it. You can try it here if you have a reasonably modern browser. I have not bothered to test for older browsers that do not support geolocation.

You will notice a couple of things about this test page. One is that it will ask your consent before attempting to retrieve your location. Another is that on a home broadband connection, it is rather inaccurate. According to Internet Explorer 9 I am in Berkhamsted – do not try and visit me there though, I am nowhere near.

image

However, if you try this on an iPad or other mobile device, you will likely get much better results. If I use the iPad, even on home wifi, it shows my house dead centre of the map.

That is only if you give consent though. Since Google + is a web application, this consent is determined by Safari, irrespective of what terms and conditions you agreed with Google. If it bothers you, you can even go to settings – location services and disable them for Safari completely:

image

That said, Google could add some code that tried to retrieve your location and would not let you use Google+ if access is denied – but it has not done so. In fact, so far the only time I have seen Safari prompt for consent in Google+ is when making a post:

image

If you agree, this allows Google+ to geotag your post.

I am sure there are other ways Google plans to use your location in Google+. For the moment though, if you would rather maintain location privacy Google+ still allows you do to do so.