My google activity history has changed android#
My google activity history has changed software#
My google activity history has changed series#

Shankari, a graduate researcher at UC Berkeley who studies the commuting patterns of volunteers in order to help urban planners. “More data for them presumably means more profit.” “They build advertising information out of data,” said Peter Lenz, the senior geospatial analyst at Dstillery, a rival advertising technology company. Google changed the practice and insisted it never recorded the data anyway.Ĭritics say Google’s insistence on tracking its users’ locations stems from its drive to boost advertising revenue.

My google activity history has changed android#

Last year, the business news site Quartz found that Google was tracking Android users by collecting the addresses of nearby cellphone towers even if all location services were off.

My google activity history has changed series#

Huge tech companies are under increasing scrutiny over their data practices, following a series of privacy scandals at Facebook and new data-privacy rules recently adopted by the European Union.

To protect his privacy, The AP didn’t plot the most telling and frequent marker - his home address. The map includes Acar’s train commute on two trips to New York and visits to The High Line park, Chelsea Market, Hell’s Kitchen, Central Park and Harlem. To demonstrate how powerful these other markers can be, the AP created a visual map of the movements of Princeton postdoctoral researcher Gunes Acar, who carried an Android phone with Location history off, and shared a record of his Google account. You can see the stored location markers on a page in your Google account at, although they’re typically scattered under several different headers, many of which are unrelated to location. You can delete these location markers by hand, but it’s a painstaking process since you have to select them individually, unless you want to delete all of your stored activity. It does not stop Google’s collection of other location markers. But leaving “Web & App Activity” on and turning “Location History” off only prevents Google from adding your movements to the “timeline,” its visualization of your daily travels. When paused, it will prevent activity on any device from being saved to your account. Called “Web and App Activity” and enabled by default, that setting stores a variety of information from Google apps and websites to your Google account. To stop Google from saving these location markers, the company says, users can turn off another setting, one that does not specifically reference location information. Frank Pallone of New Jersey called for “comprehensive consumer privacy and data security legislation” in the wake of the AP report. Mark Warner of Virginia told the AP it is “frustratingly common” for technology companies “to have corporate practices that diverge wildly from the totally reasonable expectations of their users,” and urged policies that would give users more control of their data. Google’s explanation did not convince several lawmakers. “We provide clear descriptions of these tools, and robust controls so people can turn them on or off, and delete their histories at any time.” “There are a number of different ways that Google may use location to improve people’s experience, including: Location History, Web and App Activity, and through device-level Location Services,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to the AP. “That seems like a pretty straightforward position to have.” “If you’re going to allow users to turn off something called ‘Location History,’ then all the places where you maintain location history should be turned off,” Mayer said. A researcher from Mayer’s lab confirmed the AP’s findings on multiple Android devices the AP conducted its own tests on several iPhones that found the same behavior. Storing location data in violation of a user’s preferences is wrong, said Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement bureau.

My google activity history has changed software#

The privacy issue affects some two billion users of devices that run Google’s Android operating software and hundreds of millions of worldwide iPhone users who rely on Google for maps or search.

And some searches that have nothing to do with location, like “chocolate chip cookies,” or “kids science kits,” pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude - accurate to the square foot - and save it to your Google account. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are.

)įor example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. (It’s possible, although laborious, to delete it. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.