Amplitude sending user's location to Google every app launch

[liyoung47]

Initially reported on May 8, 2020

Every app launch, Amplitude gets the users current location and sends it to Google's reverse geocoding api, and there's no way to prevent this.

AmplitudeClient.initialize(...) calls runOnLogThread()
the code run on the log thread includes:

deviceInfo = new DeviceInfo(context);
deviceInfo.prefetch();

prefetch() calls getCachedInfo(); which calls new CachedInfo(); The CachedInfo constructor calls getCountry(); which calls getCountryFromLocation();

getCountryFromLocation() will abort if DeviceInfo's locationListening property is false, but there is no way to get it to be false at this point (see below).
If it doesn't abort, getCountryFromLocation() then gets the most recent location and sends it to Google.

Why disableLocationListening doesn't work:

AmplitudeClient.disableLocationListening() sets DeviceInfo's locationListening property to false, but it's impossible to get this to happen in time to prevent Amplitude from getting current location and sending to Google.

• If I put the call to disableLocationListening before the call to initialize then it crashes because AmplitudeClient's deviceInfo property is null.
• If I put the call to disableLocationListening after the call to initialize then that's too late, it already made the call to Google.

This is the same bug that is causing issue #189 but it was not introduced in PR #117. Even before runOnLogThread was added, disableLocationListening wouldn't work unless AmplitudeClient's deviceInfo was non-null, and prefetch() is called as soon as deviceInfo is initialized so there's no way to turn off location listening in time.

BTW I am already calling AmplitudeClient.setTrackingOptions and disabling city, country, LatLng, etc before the call to initialize and this has no effect.

[haoliu-amp]

@liyoung47 Thanks for you detailed report. We will look into this ASAP at least by the end of next week.

[haoliu-amp]

@liyoung47 Hey, I just released 2.26.1. Should be available from maven repo very soon.

Please call disableLocationListening before initialize, and it won't crash now.

Also, if the city and country were not disabled with tracking options, then it will still appear since the previous info will be fetched to use later. However, new users with city, country disabled tracking options, should be able to erase those fields.