You might have heard by now about a feature that keeps records of all your physical movements, which you can easily turn off if you don’t want for this kind of data to be stored by Google. However, there is another little-known feature through which the company is tracking users’ activity. The Associated Press announced on Monday that Google is keeping records of the movements of users in an entirely different way, which is not very obvious to people. This different process works even when we turn Google Timeline off.
What does this mean?
According to Ryan Nakaskima, who is an AP technology reporter, even if you pause your Location History, there seem to be certain Google apps that will still unavoidably keep data about your location without asking for permission. As far as Google is concerned, they stated that all users should already know about this feature. In a statement, the company told AP that they do offer information about these tools and people have the option to turn them on or off whenever they want. Users can also delete the history anytime they want.
What can we do on our part?
We all know that the locations of users are precious to advertisers, as they are offering adds to people depending on their interests and location. With this in mind, we have to be aware of the fact that we might never be able to completely get rid of all the features that are slowly tracking our daily lives behind the scenes. However, this is what you can do at least for the moment, if you want to temporarily turn off this feature: you have to go to Activity Controls and then move the slider to the left. After that, all you need to do is to click Pause and you’re done.
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