Some
services on Android and iPhone automatically stores your movements
even after you pause the ‘location history’ setting
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.
For
the most part, Google is upfront about asking permission to use your
location information. 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.
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
example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely
open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones
pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches that have nothing
to do with location, such as “chocolate chip cookies” or “kids
science kits”, pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude
accurate to the square foot and save it to your Google account.
The
privacy issue affects about 2 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.
Storing
location data in violation of a user's preferences was wrong, said
Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former chief
technologist for the Federal Communications Commission's enforcement
bureau. A researcher from Mayer's lab confirmed the AP's findings on
multiple Android devices; the AP conducted its own tests on several
iPhones that found the same behavior.
“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.”
Google
says it is being perfectly clear.
“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.”
To
stop Google from saving these location markers, the company says,
users can turn off another setting, one that does not specifically
reference location information. Called “web and app activity” and
enabled by default, that setting stores a variety of information from
Google apps and websites to your Google account.
When
paused, it will prevent activity on any device from being saved to
your account. But leaving “web and app activity” on and turning
“location history” off only prevents Google from adding your
movements to the “timeline”, its visualization of your daily
travels. It does not stop Google's collection of other location
markers.
You
can delete these location markers by hand, but it's a painstaking
process since you have to select them individually, unless you want
to delete all of your stored activity.
You
can see the stored location markers on a page in your Google account
at myactivity.google.com, although they are typically scattered under
several different headers, many of which are unrelated to location.
Huge
tech companies are under increasing scrutiny over their data
practices, following a series of privacy scandals at Facebook and new
data-privacy rules recently adopted by the European Union. Last year,
the business news site Quartz found that Google was tracking Android
users by collecting the addresses of nearby cellphone towers even if
all location services were off. Google changed the practice and
insisted it never recorded the data anyway.
Critics
say Google's insistence on tracking its users' locations stems from
its drive to boost advertising revenue.
Google
offers a more accurate description of how “location history”
actually works in a place you would only see if you turn it off: a
popup that appears when you “pause” Location History on your
Google account webpage. There, the company notes that "some
location data may be saved as part of your activity on other Google
services, like Search and Maps”.
Google
offers additional information in a popup that appears if you
reactivate the “web and app activity” setting – an uncommon
action for many users, since this setting is on by default. That
popup states that, when active, the setting “saves the things
you do on Google sites, apps, and services … and associated
information, like location”.
Since
2014, Google has let advertisers track the effectiveness of online
ads at driving foot traffic, a feature that Google has said relies on
user location histories.
The
company is pushing further into such location-aware tracking to drive
ad revenue. At a Google Marketing Live summit in July, Google
executives unveiled a new tool that uses ads to boost in-person store
visits. It says it can measure how well a campaign drove foot traffic
with data pulled from Google users' location histories.
Google
also says location records stored in My Activity are used to target
ads. Ad buyers can target ads to specific locations, say, a mile
radius around a particular landmark and typically have to pay more to
reach this narrower audience.
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