Google Sends Location Data Despite The Disabled Location Setting

According to the reports by Quartz, your location data is being sent by Google despite the fact that you have no sim card, no apps and most importantly your location services are turned off. Google needs your smartphone only connected to Wifi and cellular data for tracking location from cell phone towers. Your smartphones have been doing this for the month of January 2017.Your phone collects your location data from the cell phone towers located nearby and sends this to Google as long as your device is connected to the internet and have cellular data. It was also detected that when your device having android os have been reset to factory default settings, the data was still being transmitted to Google.

A Google’s spokesperson said that it has been gathering location data through cell towers to manage the push notifications and messaging system. A network sync system is used by Android phones that require mobile Cell ID codes. This cell id data is further used to improve the speed of message delivery so that there should not be any delay in receiving the message. It started using this cell tower practice of data collecting to make betterments in Firebase Cloud Messaging. Google also claimed that data collected by addresses of cell towers is not utilized and saved.  By the end of November, Google is intended to stop this practice. 

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However, data collected is very personal and sensitive which can be used to find out much about a person’s life. People carry their mobile phones with them everywhere they are. Since location data extracted through cell tower can't give accurate results of the location. The triangulation of multiple cell towers can be helpful to determine a more exact location.This may raise concerns about the private information of a person. A person who has turned off location settings assuming that he is safe will feel concern about the privacy. Even if data is encrypted, it can be used by hackers and spyware. 
Google is an ad targeting tech giant. It says that it does not make use of cell tower location data for any of this purpose. However, things are not clear here.