Google Starts ‘Silently’ Tracking Your Phone—How To Stop It

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/03/01/forget-chrome-google-apps-start-tracking-your-phone-no-opt-out/

Mar 01, 2025

Google Chrome is about to make a huge tracking change. We await a global prompt to say no to cookies within the world’s most popular browser — albeit we will need to use private browsing for some of the new protections. But while all that’s going on, here’s a nasty new surprise for Android users who it seems will be tracked anyway.

A new Trinity College, Dublin study warns Google starts tracking your phone as soon as it’s powered on, through “cookies, identifiers and other data that Google silently stores on Android handsets,” through the default apps that are pre-installed. The researchers warn “no consent is sought for storing any of this data and there is no opt out.” They also claim “this study is the first to cast light on the cookies etc stored by pre-installed Google apps.”

This tracking starts even if you don’t open the apps, and the report claims no opt outs — which clashes with the direction being taken with Chrome’s tracking cookies. The default apps in question include Google’s Play Store and Play Services, which is particularly timely given the furor around the SafetyCore photo scanning app that has been “secretly installed” on all almost all Android phone in the last few months. This issue is the same — transparency.

The bad news here is that unlike SafetyCore, according to the researchers there’s no way to stop this. I have reached out to Google and will update with their comments on the report’s fin dings and on their advice on any way to opt out. Otherwise you might need to switch OS to kill this kind of data leakage.

The Trinity study caught cookies counting ad views and clicks alongside the Android ID which is as a “persistent device and user identifier” — albeit plenty of warnings say reset or disable this, plus usual tracking cookies. The team says “no consent is sought or given for storing any of these cookies and other data, the purposes are not stated and there is no opt out from this data storage. Most of this data is stored even when the device is idle following a factory reset and no Google apps have ever been opened by the user i.e. they are not set in response to services explicitly requested by the user.”

It’s important not to overplay these findings. I have warned for years that our phones are designed to track almost everything we do, and we need to change settings to add a modicum of privacy. The issue here is awareness. There’s also a question around how we restrict tracking from the OS itself and its core services, not just third-party apps.

The university’s Professor Doug Leith told Irish Tech News that “we all know that our consent is needed before a website stores advertising and tracking cookies when we visit it,” but that “cookies stored by apps have received far less attention than web cookies, partly because they are harder to detect, and a closer look at them is long overdue.”

This report comes just days after Google’s controversial decision to allow device fingerprinting again, after vanquishing the practice in 2019. At that time, Google said that “developers have found ways to use tiny bits of information that vary between users, such as what device they have or what fonts they have installed to generate a unique identifier which can then be used to match a user across websites. Unlike cookies, users cannot clear their fingerprint, and therefore cannot control how their information is collected. We think this subverts user choice and is wrong.”

It’s hard to see this, with its lack of control, as being much different — surely then it must be equally wrong. Google’s return to fingerprinting was justified based on new “privacy preserving” technologies that give us more optionality as to what our phones can and cannot do. It’s critical that we know what to restrict, of course.

"You are being tracked—and it can’t be stopped"
 -- Getty: