An important catch from The Associated Press, via The Guardian:
Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to.
An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so.
Computer science researchers at Princeton confirmed these findings at the AP’s request.
The article goes on to say:
Storing your minute-by-minute travels carries privacy risks and has been used by police to determine the location of suspects. So the company will let you “pause” a setting called “location history”.
Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”
That isn’t true. Even with “location history” paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.
For nearly ten years, this site has been chronicling Google’s war on user privacy, so this is hardly a surprising development. Nevertheless, it shows the need for regulation. Google is never going to reform its ways of its own accord. Its entire business model is based on destroying privacy. And it will go on doing so while feigning to care about its users until governments compel it to change its business practices.