Google Could Track Down the Location of Your Android Phone Even When It Was Turned Off

STATES CHRONICLE – If you want to prevent Google from locating you, you can always turn off the location settings on your Android phone. However, with the new update, this might not help you to go incognito. It turns out that smartphones can still send your location to Google even if the settings are turned off, or if you’re not using any apps which require you to turn it on.

Google could access your location anytime

The easiest solution to making your smartphone ‘invisible’ is to deactivate your location settings, or at least this used to be the solution. At the beginning of 2017, Android smartphones started sending their locations to the cellular towers in the area, and then they sent them back to Google. This happened any time, even if they didn’t have location on, and could have allowed any third-party apps to access this data.

This type of information sharing is known as Cell ID. When confronted about the problem, Google said it used it to improve the speed of message delivery. Also, it said that the unnecessary data was merely thrown away, and wasn’t used without the consent of smartphone owners.

This location-sharing will be disabled by the end of this month

However, after seeing that many users are not happy with the service, it promised to disable Cell ID. As a result, by the end of November, location-sharing will no longer be possible without the explicit consent of the user.

The fact that Google could access your location anytime wasn’t necessarily a huge threat to your privacy. Also, it didn’t make data available for hackers. However, the problem was the fact that it did something without users being aware of it, and used a service which they could never turn off completely.
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