BENGALURU: Google gathers more personal information from users on its Android platform than consumers know, a study by Vanderbilt University says.The study by Prof Douglas Schimdt of Vanderbit University released earlier this month points that Google collects more data of a user on an Android device as against an iPhone device. Google also has capability to identify a user based on activities on the device, even if the person accesses internet on the chrome browser in an incognito mode.“Google counts a large percentage of the world’s population as its direct customers, with multiple products leading their markets globally and many surpassing 1 billion monthly active users. These products are able to collect user data through a variety of techniques that may not be easily graspable by a general user,” Schimdt wrote in the report published on August 15.A major part of Google’s data collection occurs while a user is not directly engaged with any of its products, it said. Google is the world’s largest internet firm with over 2 billion users globally accessing its products such as search, Android phone and applications such as Gmail Photos , Keep and calendar. In the US, Android OS, owned by Google had 53% market share as on January. In India, Google is the dominant platform with nine out of 10 smartphones using Android-based phones. It has also built India-specific applications that has massive user adoption in the country.The study said that both Android and Chrome send data to Google even in the absence of any user interaction. “Our experiments show that a dormant, stationary Android phone (with Chrome active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24 hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35% of all the data samples sent to Google,” it said.In contrast, “a similar experiment showed that on an iOS Apple device with Safari (where neither Android nor Chrome were used), Google could not collect any appreciable data (location or otherwise) in the absence of a user interaction with the device.”It also claimed that Google could de-anonymize data that could help in targeting individuals. Google in a statement dismissed the study as misleading and blamed the author as a witness in an ongoing litigation with Oracle. “This report is commissioned by a professional DC lobbyist group, and written by a witness for Oracle in their ongoing copyright litigation with Google,” a Google spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “So, it’s no surprise that it contains wildly misleading information.”