Google Maps on Android is massively using dark patterns. If you are on the go and open the app, it requests to enable the location service to continue. The choices are: "Enable location service" or "Cancel". It is phrased in a way that it will not run the app if you tap on "Cancel" but it works perfectly if you select "Cancel".

The worse, if you agree, it enables the location service for everything all the time where you have the feeling it was just for the Maps app.

I just discovered that 2 days ago and I must say I was really really angry at Google for this clear dark pattern use.

I've turned off Google Play Services' permission to access location services, camera and microphone. Google Maps now basically doesn't work (it runs at ~10fps and the search box is non-interactive). Gmail scolds me every 10 second while composing emails that "this app won't work properly unless you give Google Play Services access to your camera and microphone" (but works fine otherwise.)

Their piping of apps' access to things like location through Google Play Services to force you to give them access makes a mockery of the permissions system. I really don't like the way they've been doing things the past few years.

Edit: Gmail complains about lack of access to camera and microphone, not location services. Fixed.

Wait, Gmail is using location?!

When Google released the new permission system in Android, they blew their one chance to actually make permissions meaningful. The fact that "portscan my network" is one of the Other permissions is testament to how unconcerned with user security and privacy they seem to be as an organization (despite, no doubt, some individual developers who care). I'm pretty close to deciding that my next phone will be dumb and featureless.

Wait sorry - it was camera and microphone that it nags me about. I'll update the other post.

But still, I can't see why Gmail should need access to those devices, and far less why it should harass me so aggressively about it when it works fine without them.

Just conjecture, but I feel like there was a sea-change at Google regarding attitudes towards users' privacy, about the time that adblock became widespread and competition started heating up between them and Facebook for ad revenue. They're behaving far less ethically than they did even five years ago.

Thank you. This has been going on for a while (as I recall, a Maps update last year first committed this crime - wish I had an apk backup of the prior version).

I now use HERE WeGo or OsmAnd (on non-GAPPS devices, from f-droid). While the experience is not nearly as cool, I love the fact that I am not participating in uncontrolled monitoring and unexpected battery drainage.

+1 for OSMand. The app keeps getting better and better, kudos to developers! It might not be as "cool" as G Maps (though I'm not so sure about it), but at least I can take my maps with me everywhere I go. Not to mention the fact that it is not sending my position anywhere.

And if you have the location service always enabled this gets creepy https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

I am prompted that each time I activate the GPS to use OsmAnd (for example).

The worst is that if you accept it once, this setting is saved and there is no obvious way in the UI to change it back (which was possible in the past I think).

To reset it, go in the Applications manager in the settings, choose Google Play Services and reset all its data.

There is no way it is a bug, someone had to think and put this deceptive behaviour as a feature (and someone had to design its deceptive UI, someone had to do unit testing for this deceptive behaviour, someone had to QA it…).

I was once dismissing it for like 2 months before I accidentally accepted it.

And Google is really shitty app publisher in more ways than this. Has anyone ever seen a meaningful changelog in any major app of theirs?

There's another one by Google maps where you can't choose to avoid tolls very easily. You also can't tell it to remember that you never want to use toll roads, so it is very easy for you to suddenly find yourself on a toll road.

Oh, God, don't get me started on that one. Northeastern Illinois is toll road central, and I-355 is the most expensive toll road in Illinois (save for the Chicago Skyway). Then there's that short stretch of I-80 that runs concurrently with (toll) I-294, with no reasonable alternate routes. That one isn't ridiculously expensive, but it's still annoying.

The tollways here are especially heinous when you don't use them often enough to justify the hassle of getting an I-Pass, since the cash toll is twice the I-Pass toll.