Storing your minute-by-minute travels carries privacy risks and has been used by police to determine the location of suspects — such as a warrant that police in Raleigh, North Carolina, served on Google last year to find devices near a murder scene. So the company will let you “pause” a setting called Location History.
Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”
That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking. (It’s possible, although laborious, to delete it .)
The most alarming part of this whole story is that Google says it’s being very clear about what it’s doing—clearly they are not.
On the iPhone, it simply reads, “None of your Google apps will be able to store location data in Location History.”
The iPhone text is technically true if potentially misleading. With Location History off, Google Maps and other apps store your whereabouts in a section of your account called “My Activity,” not “Location History.”
**Potentially** misleading?!
That’s like saying, “I’m not robbing you, someone else takes money from your wallet and put them in my wallet. Never mind whether I sent that person to do so.”