Apps
Google updated Phones and Messages to respect the privacy concerns of users
In response to a research study that exposed the data gathered by Google’s Phone and Messages applications, including call and text logs, the firm modified both apps to better respect and value the privacy of users.
As The Register first reported this morning, Professor Douglas Leith of Trinity College Dublin has published a new study paper exposing the data gathered by applications enabled by Google Play Services.
The study focuses specifically on two applications, Google Messages, and Google Phone, which are the basic SMS/MMS/RCS and dialer apps used by default on the Pixel series and other manufacturers of Android phones. Each app has been downloaded more than a billion times.
Is Google collecting users’ private data through Phones and Messages?
Google Play Services tells all users that it gathers data essential for things like upgrading your phone and syncing data, but the new research indicated it would be able to more deeply link data about a given individual or to connect many persons. Importantly, the data being transferred that was revealed in the report did not appear to be protected under Google’s Privacy Policies, nor was it feasible to opt-out in most situations.
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When you get an incoming call in Google Phone with the “See caller and spam ID” checkbox is enabled, the incoming phone number and current time are sent to Google’s servers unless the number is in your contacts. According to the researchers, Google Chrome has previously handled a similar issue, with the Safe Surfing feature not sending the URLs you’re browsing to Google servers.
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Google Phone also recorded the precise time (to the millisecond) and duration of your incoming and outgoing phone conversations, which were tagged with your phone’s unique “Android ID.” Google could conceivably track the persons engaged in each given phone call by comparing those timestamps.
Before any modifications were made, Google said that they were already anonymizing such data within their servers by rounding incoming timestamps to the closest hour. To better represent this reality, the Google Phone app will now round data on your phone, ensuring that Google servers never get the exact data.
Google Messages includes a logging system that is identical to Phones. However, Google claims that these message hashes were used to fine-tune the app to ensure that your incoming and outgoing messages showed in the right sequence.
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These crucial privacy-focused improvements were already widely available beginning in February, with Google Phone version 75 and Google Messages version 10.9. In the future, Google plans to make more of its privacy policies and data gathering information available in these applications through “Privacy Tours” for both new and current users.
Google Phone will also soon make it easy to be aware that spam prevention is engaged and that incoming unknown phone numbers are being routed to Google.
Overall, these are necessary reforms, but they raise larger concerns about data collecting across other Google apps, as this research was limited to Messages and Phones.
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