Re:Australian regulator investigates Google data harvesting ...
by dx034 on Monday May 14, 2018 @05:58AM
(#17064134)
I think data transfer is a big issue. Even at Google's scale, 10 petabytes a month (10 million android users) probably creates more costs than it's worth for them. It's much easier to compress data on the device and only send new information, with that you can easily get a month of location history <10mb even for people who move a lot.
> could be harvesting a gigabyte of data from devices each month
Which is unlikely to be true in the literal sense of pure bytes transferred simply because: a) people would notice that very soon, b) people consume gigabytes but don't produce nearly as much - all of my monthly activity would likely fit in a few MB, c) processing that much is a pain - at the scale of millions of users they'd optimise that.