Google Calls Location Data 'Valuable'

Google's collection of location information from millions of mobile devices and personal computers is "extremely valuable" to the company's future business, according to an email written by a Google product manager last year.

That email and others, which are part of a public filing in a lawsuit against Google last year, shed new light on the company's thinking about the need to gather location-related data. Such information is essential for a growing number of mobile applications and websites to function properly, the emails indicate. It is also useful for companies such as Google -- whose Android software powers millions of phones—that want to offer consumers advertisements that are tailored to their locations, a new frontier for online ads. The disclosure of the internal emails follows a series of other revelations about location data gathered by Google and Apple Inc. The revelations prompted the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to schedule a hearing on May 10 to discuss the companies' practices. Google, with users' permission, collects information about wireless networks surrounding mobile devices powered by Google's Android operating system. It also gets information about the location of wireless networks near personal computers if the PCs' owners are using Google's Chrome Web browser or versions of some other browsers. Tech companies are using such information to build databases of millions of wireless networks, or Wi-Fi "access points," which help determine the approximate location of phones and computers attached to those networks.