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The company is stalking you even when you tell it not to.
For years most people thought that if you disabled Location History in your Google settings that meant the company would stop tracking your movements. Turns out that’s not totally true.
An investigation by the Associated Press has found that Google tracks and stores your location data even if you’ve instructed it to pause your Location History.
How To Stop Google Tracking You
So is there any way you can get Google to stop tracking you? Thankfully, yes–but you’ll need to take multiple steps.
Pause Location History
This is the first step you should take. To pause your location history, go to https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/activitycontrols and under the Location History card, toggle the switch to off. Once you do this, Google will stop recording your location to your timeline.
However, as the AP report shows–doing only this won’t stop Google from tracking your location.
Pause Web & App Activity
What you really need to do to stop Google from using its tricks to track your location is to pause Web & App Activity. Doing this will depersonalize your map and search results (for example, in maps you won’t see saved locations)–but you reclaim your privacy.
To pause your Web & App Activity, go to https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/activitycontrols and under the Web & App Activity card, toggle the switch to off.
Ditch Android
Yep, even if you take the steps above, you’re still not totally free of Google’s snooping if you’re an Android user. As the AP researchers found out, Google will spy on your location–and timestamp your Google account with your location detail, if you use Google’s default weather services on Android.
This is shady as all get out–and speaking of get out, you should get out of the Android ecosystem if google doesn’t change this.
Source: Know Your Mobile
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