Privacy advocates are filing a complaint today with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that mobile carriers and handset providers have been deceptively misleading customers into using devices and services that expose their private data to advertisers. The head of the Center for Digital Democracy, one of the groups filing the complaint, specifically targeted Google as a source of the group's ire, though many other companies are named in the complaint.

The core of the complaint is mostly speculative, as there have been no widely-reported cases of privacy breaches tied to information collected by mobile providers on their subscribers. The CDD's fears seem to come from the lack of a Google privacy policy specifically dealing with its interests in mobile markets. The concern is that on account of its Android platform and ubiquitous web services, Google will be able to not only keep track of its users' browsing habits, emails, and photos, but now also real-time GPS information delivered by Android handsets.

While Google has not commented yet on today's complaint, it has made statements in the past on theses sort of issues. While it doesn't see static tracking cookies as a privacy concern, the kind downloaded and accessed each time you visit a certain website, the company said it would make users opt-in if they wanted to share their location data with advertisers. That information would only be shared if you specifically wanted information on ads for nearby services.

Other companies named in the complaint include big names like Yahoo! and AT&T, along with smaller companies whose sole purpose seems to be amalgamating data from mobile devices and using it to build targeted advertisement packages. The CDD wants the FTC to pay closer attention to these kind of companies, keeping an eye out for practices that violate consumer privacy.

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