An Associated Press investigation has revealed this week that by turning off the location based tracking feature on your phone is not at all enough to stop Google from receiving any kind of information about where you are. Even if someone were to turn off a feature that logs their location into their Google account settings, the Internet Giant can get complete and good details of where you are right now through other settings that aren’t as clearly labeled as collecting location information.
Responding to the report, Google said that all those settings are clear and that people are at their will to choose to change them at any time.
And now if you want to shut down or limit what Google collects from your phone, you can easily do that by checking some places as detailed here. To understand the full extent of Google’s collection needs a deeper check through settings, just not only on your phone but also on your Google account.
What To Look For And Change On Your Phone
The first and best things to do is to turn off location services on your phone. This not only prevents your device from actively sending your location data to device or app makers, but also implies that you won’t be able to use any if those location-based service at all. For those who prefer to get this option on when you need to use any of such features, such as for navigating, then it’s a very good idea to add location services to the quick settings menu on your smartphone to easily toggle it on and off.
To disable location tracking on any of your Android device, head to the “Security and location” section of your settings app and tap “Location.” Depending on what version of Android you may own, the steps may be different from there, but you should be able to find atleast a setting that allows you to switch this “off.”
On your iPhone, go to the “Privacy” section available in the Settings app and turn “Location Services” off.
What You Need To Do On Google account
If you don’t want to keep location services in a switch off mode at all times but want to limit what Google sees, there is the option always available to stop Google from keeping a comprehensive timeline of your whereabouts through the location history setting.
The AP investigation found that turning off location history is not at all enough to stop all of Google’s collection, because the company has put another location data collection control in another part of its account settings, but it’s still a setting that needs to be disabled if you’re concerned about broadcasting your whereabouts to Google.
You can find this in your Google account settings available online, by navigating to “Personal Info and Privacy” and then looking for “My Activity.” On your Android device, you can also use your settings app to access your account settings. In this case, activity can be seen under a section called “Data & personalization.”
Once you are there, the “Location History” section offers the option to turn the whole setting off, and also to review and delete the information Google has collected thus far.
Google allows the option to turn off location history for your whole account in general or just certain devices in particular.
Google account: Web and App Activity
This is the real treasure of information, where Google stores not only location information from different apps but also a variety of other information, such as browser or Google Maps searches you’ve made while being logged into your Google account. It also keeps track of what other devices you’ve used while logged into your Google account.
Again, you can find this all in menu either in your Android smartphone settings for your Google account – in the “Data & Personalization” section – or by logging into the privacy settings of your Google account on any of your mobile or desktop site.
The system is well designed to let you delete data by category or time period. If you want to delete about what Google has collected on you already in this area, click the three dots at the top and select “Delete.”
You can also turn off this kind of tracking, but it will limit more than location collection. As Google itself will warn you about that, disabling this sort of tracking also limits the service’s ability to collect information on the places you go day in and day out – which some may want for the convenience of storing commonly attended locations.
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