Google already gets enough bad press about snooping on our private data and tracking us everywhere we go, so you'd think the company would try its hardest to avoid getting itself embroiled in any further scandal – but you'd be damn wrong.
A whole host of Android Pie users recently noticed that their phone's Battery Saver mode had been activated without their input, and as a result, their handset was limiting the background activity of certain key applications, disabling high-drain processes (such as location tracking) and generally slowing the phone down to retain as much juice as possible. This is, of course, all stuff that the Battery Saver mode is supposed to do – but only when you want it to. In this case, the setting had been enabled by Google itself without the consent of the end user.
It is believed that only Google's Pixel line of handsets and the Andy Rubin-made Essential Phone were impacted by this fiddling, as they are the only ones which have access to the full Android Pie OS at this moment in time. That means the wider Android community is unaffected, but that doesn't make the whole scenario any less concerning.
As well as reducing the phone's overall performance level, Battery Saver also prevents certain notifications coming through, which means impacted users could have missed critical messages from friends, family and work. Location-based services may also have been affected, so any apps which rely on knowing where you are won't have functioned as expected. Oops.
Disgruntled Android fans have taken to Reddit to express their concern with this move, forcing the company to issue a statement. “This was an internal experiment to test battery saving features that was mistakenly rolled out to more users than intended,” a Google representative posted on the PixelCommunity subreddit. “We have now rolled battery saver settings back to default. Please configure to your liking. Sorry for the confusion.”
The response from the wider Android community has been mixed; some are rightly annoyed that Google has the power to not only tinker with their phone's settings without them knowing but also to cause messages to fail and other services to not work as intended. However, a few voices of reason have come out and said that Google has the right to alter settings to test certain elements of the Android Pie OS before it gets rolled out to more devices all over the world.
Whatever your stance on this situation, this is yet another privacy scandal that Google could really have done with avoiding. If it can change your battery settings then it stands to reason that it can access and change other parts of your phone's functionality, which is sure to have the more anxious Pixel and Essential Phone owners out there moving over to iOS pretty swiftly.
by dmcferran via Featured Articles
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