> If someone has access to your Google Account, they can easily activate the find my phone feature and see exactly where you are without your knowledge.
When your phone is located using the "Find my phone" feature, it pops up a notification on the phone (this phone has been located). Of course, if they had physical access to your phone in the past, they may have blocked this notification, but it is provided by Google Play Services, so that requires to block a wide range of notifications (eg. all "app update available" notifications iirc).
On the other hand, they may access your location history, if you enabled that, and see where you went in the (possibly very recent) past without any notification.
I'm not criticizing your post, just noting that all of your points are about Location Services and not the Trusted Contacts App.
Trusted Contacts just hooks into Location Services to allow the user to explicitly share already captured information with 3rd parties.
Location Services is used by tons of other apps and if you dumb it down or turn it off those apps will stop working or beg you to turn on the most granular of it's settings.
Here are some of the ways that Location Services is used:
- Google Wallet will see you're at XYZ Retail store and pop up a notification with your rewards card barcode on it.
- Google Maps will see you're at the trendy new restaurant and ask you to snap a couple photos and review the place.
- Google Now or Maps (not entirely sure which) will tell you if your commute home is going to suck or not and alert you to accidents on the road ahead.
- Google Rewards will ask you randomly/creepily "have you been to ABC and if so when?" and give you a pittance for your data.
- If someone has access to your Google Account, they can easily activate the find my phone feature and see exactly where you are without your knowledge.
Regardless of whether or not you have any of these Apps installed, if Location Services is on then it is silently tracking your location. You can see everything it tracks on your timeline (https://www.google.com/maps/timeline)