Location data game gets hotter
Google is once again under investigation over location tracking. This time, the South Korean police raided the Seoul office suspecting its mobile advertising unit AdMob illegally collecting location data without users' consent. Google bought AdMob last year for $750 million.
According to Reuters, the police said that "Google should have sought permission from the Korean Communication Commission before tracking users' locations." Google is reportedly cooperating with the investigation. There has been a series of similar probes conducted across Google offices in the United States, Britain, France, Singapore, Switzerland and South Korea over location data collected by its ‘Street View' cars.
Google has been under South Korean fire before. Seoul police had earlier concluded that Google collected location information from 600,000 wireless Internet users in South Korea with such cars. Soon after this, Google reportedly tightened its privacy policy.
Last month, the country's top internet portals filed anti-trust complaints against the company, claiming it was "unfairly stifling competition in Korea's mobile internet search market of one of the world's most wired countries."
Last month, both Apple and Google were in serious trouble over location tracking and US lawmakers were constantly quizzing the two companies over their practices of recording and storing locations. Apple was quick to defend its use of iPhone location data. The upcoming iOS 4.3.3 reportedly hopes to fix all location tracking bugs.
According to BGR, the location tracking issues will be addressed in the upcoming update. The upcoming update will "no longer back up the location database to iTunes. The size of the location database will be reduced. The location database will be deleted entirely when Location Services are turned off." There might also be battery life improvements and iPod bug fixes.
