Recently, Google fell prey of recording your live-location even after turning your location off. This has lead to a lot of doubts about the user’s privacy since the data seems to be recorded even when it has the slightest contact with cellular towers as long as it’s turned on and one or when it in range. Since completely hiding your movements from cell towers is way past in any one’s hands as it is a matter of law, the line between privacy and law is very slim. While Google suggests the settings you can follow to turn off recording your movements, some settings might mean entirely different from what you think and this is why we bring you this article to explain how you can stop your Android phone from sharing your location with Google.
Location History: This feature in on every smartphone and is the data show you a list of where your phone has been and when. While this is a perfectly nifty feature to have to keep track, it can be turned on or off, but turning off doesn’t delete the data. Once it is off, your future location history and data won’t be saved anymore. However, turning this off has no impact on how apps function and they still can know where you are, in fact, a simple Google search even with location turned off can read where you are to produce customized results. According to research, Google is said to store a snapshot of your location even if you open maps for a second.
The automatic daily weather updates on your Android phones can also pinpoint your location roughly and this will lead to saving your location data. You can check which app has access to your location by going into the settings and then in the application permissions setting if you’re curious.
Web activity: According to Google, the data collected through apps is stored to enhance the user experience. The web-activity is where you can see the list of apps which have access to your location. Whenever any app on any your device when logged into your Google account, the data is collected and stored into your Google account. This has nothing to do with location history so even if you revoke the location permission, nothing changes and apps continue to access your location. Since this is a privacy issue that some users might have concerns, Google gives you the option to disable some of these settings which can be done from the Web. Fire up Chrome and head over to ‘Activity Control’ and the settings you need are present on top under the name ‘Web & App Activity and Location History. Here, you just need to shut down by toggling the blue icon, you can also see what’s been collected by opening the ‘MANAGE ACTIVITY.’
Right after you turn off the settings, Google will warn you that Assistant will become useless and other apps that rely on Google location services will work differently and you will no longer get narrow and specific search results tailored to you.
Basically, this means that Apps and other services that keep a tab on you will no longer work or get trimmed down. So, what I want to convey is, the amount of work Google does in customizing the experience to us is based on the data it collects, so it becomes useless, our experiences will be down. Privacy comes at a cost Indeed. Since all the data is locked to your single Google account changing one reflects on other things as well. This article is more like explaining to you how you can stay incognito from Google, but not to go that way. So, the choice is still up to you.
