Google Tracks Your Movements Even After You Tell It Not To

Study reveals that, Google isn't leaving you any where even though you requested not to track and this might be violating one's privacies all the way.

An Associated Press investigation founded
that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you've used privacy settings that say they will prevent it from doing so.

An app like Google Maps will remind you to allow access to location if you use it for navigating. If you agree to let it record your location over time, Google Maps will display that history for you in a "timeline" that maps out your daily movements.

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.

"If you're going to allow users to turn off something called 'Location History,' then all the places where you maintain location history should be turned off," Mayer said. "That seems like a pretty straightforward position to have."

"There are a number of different ways that Google may use location to improve people's experience, including: Location History, Web and App Activity, and through device-level Location Services," a Google spokesperson said in a statement to the AP. "We provide clear descriptions of these tools, and robust controls so people can turn them on or off, and delete their histories at any time."

"They build advertising information out of data," said Peter Lenz, the senior geospatial analyst at Dstillery, a rival advertising technology company. "More data for them presumably means more profit."

Sean O'Brien, a Yale Privacy Lab researcher with whom the AP shared its findings, said it is "disingenuous" for Google to continuously record these locations even when users disable Location History. "To me, it's something people should know,"