Of all of the accusations routinely hurled Google’s approach, there’s one which particularly alarms customers: the corporate can monitor the placement of all Android — and to some extent, Apple — telephones. Previous expertise means that Google certainly does this — not solely utilizing this information to show adverts, but in addition storing it in Location Historical past and even offering it to regulation enforcement companies. Now Google guarantees to solely retailer Location Historical past on the system. Ought to we consider it?
What’s fallacious with Location Historical past?
Location Historical past permits you to simply view the locations a person visited and after they did so. You need to use it for every kind of issues: remembering the title of that seaside or restaurant you went to whereas on trip two years in the past, discovering the tackle of a spot your higher half usually goes to after work, getting new bar options based mostly on those you’ve been to, finding the florist that delivered the shock bouquet for a celebration, and lots of extra. The other ways this function each advantages and harms Google account holders are generally reported. Little marvel then that many — even these with a clear consciences — usually need to flip it off fully.
Regrettably, Google has usually been caught abusing its Location Historical past setting. Even when explicitly disabled, Location Historical past was nonetheless collected beneath “Internet & App Exercise”. This led to a sequence of lawsuits, which Google misplaced. In 2023, the corporate was ordered to pay $93 million beneath one go well with, and a 12 months earlier $392 million beneath one other. These fines had been however a pinprick to an organization with tons of of billions of {dollars} in income, however not less than the courtroom had Google revise its location monitoring practices.
The mixed authorized and public strain apparently led to the corporate saying on the finish of 2023 a drastic change: now, in line with Google, Location Historical past will probably be collected and saved on customers’ gadgets solely. However does that make the function any safer?
How does Location Historical past (supposedly) work in 2024?
Initially, examine that the function has been up to date in your system. As is wont with Google, updates for the billions of Android gadgets roll out in waves, and to comparatively latest OS variations solely. So, until you see an alert that appears just like the one under, it’s seemingly your system hasn’t acquired the replace, and enabling Location Historical past will save the info on Google’s servers.
Except Google has explicitly warned you that your Location Historical past will probably be saved in your system, it’s prone to proceed being saved to Google’s servers
In case your Location Historical past is now saved domestically, nevertheless, Google Maps will supply choices for centralized administration of your “locations”. By deciding on some extent on the map, akin to a espresso store, and opening its description, you’ll see all of the instances you visited the place up to now, all searches for the place on the map, and different issues like that. One faucet on the placement card can delete your whole exercise related to the place.
Google says it is going to retailer the historical past for every place for 3 months by default after which delete it. To vary this setting or disable historical past, merely faucet the blue dot on the map that exhibits your present location and switch off Location Historical past within the window that pops up.
Choices for configuring and disabling Location Historical past
An apparent draw back to offline Location Historical past is that it received’t be accessible to the person on their different gadgets. As a workaround, Google suggests storing an encrypted backup on its servers.
Needless to say what we’re discussing right here is the brand new implementation of Location Historical past as described by Google. Detailed evaluation of how this new sample truly works might reveal pitfalls and caveats that nobody besides Google’s builders is aware of about at this level.
What threats does this replace get rid of?
Though the brand new storage technique improves the privateness of location information, it will possibly’t be thought-about a one-size-fits-all answer to all present points. So how does it have an effect on numerous hypothetical risk eventualities?
- Monitoring you to customise adverts. That is unlikely to be affected in any approach: Google can proceed to gather information on locations you go to in an anonymized, generalized kind. You’ll preserve seeing adverts linked to your present or previous areas until you disable both that or all focused adverts completely. Keep in mind that Google isn’t the one one on the market monitoring your location. Different apps and companies have been discovered responsible of abusing this information as effectively; listed below are a number of examples: one, two, and three.
- Evil hackers and cyberspies. These malicious teams usually use business spy ware (stalkerware) or malicious implants, so the adjustments to Google’s Location Historical past will hardly have an effect on them.
- Jealous companion or prying relative. It’ll be tougher to make use of a pc on which you’re signed in to your Google account to trace your location. Somebody might nonetheless quietly snoop in your telephone whereas it’s unlocked, in addition to secretly set up business spy ware akin to stalkerware, which we talked about above. Subsequently, it’s common steps to guard smartphones from cell spy ware, not the updates to Google Maps, which can be essential to addressing this.
- Legislation enforcement. This isn’t prone to change a lot, as, along with asking Google, the police can request your location information from the cell service or deduce it from surveillance digital camera footage, which is each simpler and sooner.
So, the replace doesn’t assist person privateness all that a lot, does it? We’re afraid not.
How do I successfully shield my location information?
You’re restricted to pretty drastic choices nowadays if you wish to forestall location monitoring. We record these right here in ascending order of extremity.
- Use complete safety on all of your gadgets, together with telephones and tablets. This may cut back the chance of being uncovered to malware, together with stalkerware.
- Disable Google Location Historical past and Internet & App Exercise, keep away from giving location permissions to any apps besides navigation apps, flip off personalised adverts, and use a DNS service that filters adverts.
- Flip off all geo-tracking options (GPS, Google location companies, and others) in your smartphone.
- When on an particularly essential journey, activate flight mode for an hour or two, or simply flip off your smartphone.
- Ditch smartphones in favor of essentially the most primary dumbphones.
- Finally, cease carrying round any sort of telephone in any respect.
- Stay 100% off-grid; e.g., in a cave.
