Guess Who Is Also Confused By The Google Privacy Settings You And I Have To Deal With?

Documents also indicate that Google’s privacy policy made it easy, at least for the Google apps, to collect location data from another Google app on your phone, even if you turned off location tracking for the first one.

Google has shared a statement on the location data and privacy settings issue. “Privacy controls have long been built into our services and our teams work continuously to discuss and improve them. In the case of location information, we’ve heard feedback, and have worked hard to improve our privacy controls. In fact, even these cherry-picked published extracts state clearly that the team’s goal was to ‘Reduce confusion around Location History Settings’,” Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said in a statement to the Arizona Mirror.

While Google has made changes to its Privacy Controls over time, they are still not as simple as an on and off setting. And within it are layers which users may not immediately notice. For instance, Google will show personalized ads to you and a lot of that personalization happens with the location data it gets. You can turn off ad personalization by simply toggling it off, but that does not mean Google still wouldn’t access your general location and still serve you adverts. It simply is a matter of Google no longer collecting your exact GPS location, but it still knows a larger radius of your location.