Hiding your location from Google is next to impossible. The company makes it difficult to adjust the settings, and whoever succeeds in doing so is still followed by the company despite explicit refusal.
Court documents from a lawsuit from the US state of Arizona against Google over location data collection reveal some of the company’s dubious practices, Business Insider reports.
For example, Google deliberately made it difficult to find settings for collecting location data or formulated as incomprehensibly as possible to make people drop out.
At the same time, Google also continued to collect users’ location in other ways, for example, through Google apps or other apps that share the location with Google. This allowed Google to map essential places such as your home address or work location.
An internal presentation from 2014 even shows that Google tried to guess itself due to a lack of data. When two users were in the same house, it could estimate based on Wi-Fi usage, among other things, that it was a roommate at the same address.
The documents and testimonials also show that the Google Maps settings menu was redesigned to make it more difficult for people to find their way to the settings.
Google also imposed its practices on others. For example, phone maker LG was pressured to hide privacy settings similarly in their modified version of Android.
