Google Korea faces probe for collecting Android users' data
Google has been collecting data on Android phones for 11 months without users’ consent. / Courtesy of Pixabay
By Chyung Eun-ju
The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) will investigate Google Korea for allegedly tracking Android users’ location data without their consent.
The KCC said on Thursday it will then decide if Google has infringed the Privacy Act and violated the Information Communications Network Act.
“We will figure out what was collected and confirm whether they violated the Information Communication Network Act and Location Information Act,” said Chun Ji-hyun, the manager of the KCC’s Privacy Infringement Investigation Division.
“Not only was this a national issue, but an issue that came to light from the U.S. We will see how this is handled globally.”
Google Korea has admitted collecting the data. “Since Jan. 31, 2017, we have been collecting data in order to improve the Android OS,” Google Korea said. “We are planning to prohibit this kind of data collection and we will update the program to stop the function of data collection on the cell site.”
Google has been receiving location data that the Android phones have been collecting despite the GPS being turned off. About 78 percent of Koreans have phones running Android software.
News website Quartz reported on Tuesday that the Android phones collected the addresses of nearby cellular towers _ even phones with no SIM card _ and the data was received by Google.
“In January of this year, we began looking into using cell ID codes as an additional signal to further improve the speed and performance of message delivery,” the Google spokesperson
in an email. “However, we never incorporated cell ID into our network sync system, so that data was immediately discarded, and we updated it to no longer request cell ID.”
“According to the law, collecting data about location without the user’s consent is a violation that can result in less than five years of jail or a fine of less than 50 million won,” Kim Seung-joo, an informatics professor from Korea University, told YTN on Thursday. “But what Google did is worth an astronomical amount.”
Google Korea was penalized by the KCC for infringing the Privacy Act by illegally gathering personal data to develop its Street View service back in Jan. 2014. Google was fined 210 million won.