Google tracks Android users before they open apps, report says [Video]

It’s pretty much assumed that using a smartphone means that some company somewhere is tracking you. However, people usually expect to have to actually use the thing before it starts to track their usage. Apparently, for Android users at least, that may not be the case. 

A recent study from D.J. Leith at Trinity College Dublin took a deep dive into the messy world of device IDs, trackers, and analytics cookies on Android devices and found that Google tracks users before they even have a chance to open an app. Leith was able to identify at least 14 cookies, trackers, and device identifiers that are created and stored on Android devices almost immediately upon setup. 

Worse yet, there doesn’t appear to be a way to permanently opt out of any of them. 

“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,” Leith wrote in …