Americans file a lawsuit against Google for data usage of phoning home Android

A group of four Americans has filed a lawsuit against Google for data transmissions between their smartphones and Google servers. It concerns about 260MB per month of, according to them, unnecessary data that can go over mobile networks.

Prosecutors ran a test with a new Samsung Galaxy S7, on which only a Google account is registered; the rest remained by default and the phone was not used or moved, but was only on. The device sent and received 8.88MB of data per day, 94 percent of which was communication with Google, according to their claim.

According to the group, none of the agreements that a user must agree to – do not state the Terms of Service; the Privacy Policy; the Managed Google Play Agreement; and the Google Play Terms of Service – something about these data transmissions, their content or why they should be sent and received.

The Americans do not rule out telemetry: things like available networks, which apps are open and what the operating system is doing. They do not condemn that these things are sent to Google, but they do condemn the fact that these transmissions apparently cannot wait until the device is connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Prosecutors accuse Google of the data streams containing the information for ads: tokens that identify a user for the purpose of targeted advertising, but also pre-loads of actual ads, even if the user isn’t actually going to see them, as in their test setup. used to be.

The prosecutors not only want compensation for the mobile data credit that Google has used to date in the background, but they also want compensation for the value of the personal data that went to Google in the described process, writes The Register. The value of the data is estimated at a dollar per month, according to that site.