
Google Edits Help Page After Location-Tracking Revelation - TheGuyWhoCodes
http://fortune.com/2018/08/16/google-location-tracking-privacy-search-maps/
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ledriveby
I wish the media would hold the same hue and cry over telco tracking. ISPs are
unrepentantly shady about their collection and resale of PII but nobody bats
an eye...

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cascom
While I wholeheartedly agree with you:

1\. Everyone I know already hates their cable/phone company

2\. The ISPs don’t pretend to be a force for good, or not be evil, or allow
you to have privacy controls

they essentialy meet their very low expectations so it’s not really “news”

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econ4all
Location history != location tracking no matter how much some people want it
to be, it's a location feature not the master switch for all location
features.

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amaccuish
No one was expecting it to disable tracking, you do that by disabling Location
Services. What they did expect was that Google would stop saving their
location to Google's servers, but no, you have to also tend to some other
seemingly unrelated toggle (from the article "Some location data may be saved
as part of your activity on other services, like Search and Maps.")

Also, if I turn of location history on my phone, Maps won't show me what I
last searched for. Has Google forgotten how to store locally? I don't mind my
device saving my location, what I don't want is it being stored on servers out
of my control. Google knew exactly what they were doing here, and pretty
forcefully persuade you to not switch any of it off.

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econ4all
Every article I read on this confused "location history" with "location
services", if you are aware of the difference you shouldn't be surprised that
location data is still being sent to their servers.

The Google experience is all about apps backed by the cloud, that's when their
apps are at their max utility, I get why some people might not want that but
that's no cause to ascribe malice to them.

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breatheoften
I use google maps on iOS without logging into google — why can’t I see my
recent search history reliably on the local device?

I feel like there’s a tipping point where “we have the strategy that data is
delivered to/from the cloud” becomes a way to punish users who turn features
off for privacy reasons ...

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londons_explore
It's nearly double the work...

Most apps implementation (for example chrome) is to store all profile data in
a local store, which then gets synced to the cloud, and to all other devices
logged in as you.

If you switch off a privacy option, that simply switches off the saving of
that data to the store. In turn, that means it doesn't get synced to the
server.

An alternative implementation might be to still save the data to the store (so
it's available for local use), but tag it in some way so it doesn't get
synced. That proves very difficult though because then the store can become
inconsistent, with some other contradictory data in the store in a part which
_does_ get synced, put there by the server or another device signed in as you.

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amaccuish
You've managed to make a mountain out of a mole hill. I promise you you're way
overthinking this.

And that's not how Chrome works at all. When you turn off sync, it just stops
syncing up to Google, it's got nothing to do with local on-disk storage.

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dalu
Annoying "You're from the EU" nagscreen. Every time I see one of those when I
visit a site, I navigate back. And yours is especially annoying since it's
full screen.

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Hamcha
If it's popular enough I just search the URL on google and use the cached
version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7B6ZEd0...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7B6ZEd001mkJ:fortune.com/2018/08/16/google-
location-tracking-privacy-search-maps/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=it)

