If you’ve ever checked traffic for worrying about mobile data usage charges, some might be surprised to see if the operating system or apps pre-installed by the manufacturer are using the communication capacity unexpectedly. An American Android user filed a class lawsuit against Google for wasting Google’s smartphone communication capacity.
According to reports, Android users charged Google on November 12 for wasting their smartphone communication capacity. The lawsuit was filed by four plaintiffs in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin in the Northern District Federal District Court in San Jose, California. In the indictment, the plaintiff claimed that Google had consumed limited communication capacity and collected personal information without obtaining permission for Android users.
The plaintiff’s problem is not the data transmitted and received over Wi-Fi and the application data used by the user, but the unintended communication of Android users in which apps running in the background are transmitted through mobile data.
Android users need to agree to four terms, including the terms of use and privacy policy, for Android users to use their smartphones, but the plaintiff complains that no conditions are specified for background communication using user communication capacity.
To support this claim, the plaintiff actually logged in to a Google account on Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy S7 and left it without Wi-Fi connected. Presented the results. This means that even if you don’t use your smartphone at all, data communication for 260MB per month occurs.
In this experiment, all apps were in an idle state, but data transmission occurred 16 times per hour and 389 times per 24 hours between the Google server and the terminal. In addition, as a result of researching the contents of communication, the data collected by Google is said to be data related to operating system metrics and log files that record network strength.
The plaintiff accused Google of collecting user-identifying data for the advertising business and sending preloaded advertisements that could earn money without being displayed. Google declined to comment. In addition, Method Media Intelligence, which provides an advertisement monitoring service, answered that it is possible to ask whether there is an event that can be counted as an event that can charge advertisement fees even when preloaded advertisements are not displayed.
In this lawsuit, the plaintiff is demanding that Google recover a price equivalent to the amount of communication used for its own benefit, and this amount is estimated to have amounted to more than $5 million retroactively over the past few years when the case in question began. have. Related information can be found here .