[kingu]

There's no scanning of the chips in your card when you enter a store. Google simply tracks your phone via pings off of GPS and cell towers. They know when you entered the store (approximately) and when you left (approximately.) If the settings are right on your phone, they even know which departments you went into in the store.

How do you stop that? Just leave the phone in the car or disable the GPS (it'll still activate when you dial 911.)

[Pollard]

Any app that uses location services tends to run in the background and continue to collect location data. It would be nice if the open source guys would hurry up and finish work on an open source OS for phones. There’s a few different groups working on it. That will give us the ability to not use android or iOS.

That reminds me. I need to go to AT&T store and see if they’ll take back this ZTE phone of ours. We’ve had it well over a year but maybe they’ll give us credit towards another phone if I bitch enough. “You sold me a phone with Chinese spyware on it”