In recent weeks the latest security news hitting the headlines comes from the Associated Press. Working with computer-science researchers at Princeton, the Associated Press discovered that despite turning location history off in the settings of a mobile phone, Google was still tracking its whereabouts. Consequently, they found that Google has been tracking your movements whether you have given them permission to or not.
This is in contradiction to the help page for the Location History feature, which is used on its apps such as Google Maps. This originally stated that “with Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored”. However, Google has since updated its help page to clarify that turning off location history doesn’t stop them from tracking you through the web, they are in fact tracking your location by other means, and this has been happening all along.
This has come as shocking news to those using Googles services under the pretence that their location remained secure if they turned off location history. In fact, the Associated Press claims that “this privacy issue affects some two billion users of devices that run Google’s Android operating software and hundreds of millions of worldwide iPhone users who rely on Google for maps or search”.
Google doesn’t make it is easy to actually turn off location tracking either. In addition to location history, Google apps are automatically storing location data without asking through “Web and App Activity”, and if you are wondering why Google is so insistent on tracking your location, it is simply to make a profit by helping advertisers target consumers more accurately.
Turning off Web and App Activity should stop Google from tracking your location. To do this, log in with your Google account into myactivity.google.com from your mobile device, navigate to “Activity Controls” then toggle “Web and App Activity” to pause it.
