This cute little bastard knows where you've been.
As the furore over the sneaky tracking of iPhone user’s movements rumbles on, it has now emerged that Android phones are doing a very similar thing, bad news for those of us who don’t want our mobiles to be recording our every movement for no apparent good reason.
The data recorded by Android phones isn’t as extensive as on iPhones – the locations and unique IDs of the last 50 mobile masts it has communicated with are stored, along with the last 200 wi-fi networks that it has ‘seen’ and info is over-written once that limit is reached.
The information is harder to find in the phone and at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that any of it is sent to Google, unlike the iPhone data, which could theoretically be forwarded automatically to Apple if the phone’s user has agreed to provide them with ‘diagnostic information’.
The Android data collecting was discovered by Swedish programmer Magnus Eriksson, who said: “Following the latest days’ internet outrage/overreaction to the revelation that iPhone has a cache for its location service, I decided to have look what my Android devices caches for the same function”.
Is it an overreaction or should we be concerned by the fact that our phones are tracking our movements? Has real life suddenly turned into a bad episode of The Prisoner? Tell us dear readers… TELL US!
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