Maps app -> Settings -> Notifications -> Your Contributions (and uncheck boxes as desired).

The controls exist.

My guess is that doesn't turn off tracking but now you just won't be notified of it.

I admit though, as a user of the data, I find this very helpful. Google is absolutely brilliant at give real time traffic information to roads and businesses. You want to know if Costco is busy right now, they'll tell you. Accident getting there going to cost you 5 minutes, they'll tell you that too.

That's a separate option called location history. Alternatively you can turn off location in Android.

But does that mean Google stops collecting the data? Sure, no notifications, but will they still know what restaurant I just walked past?

As mentioned several times, disable Location History under Settings -> Google -> Location (on stock Google Androids you find that setting under Settings -> Location as well).

Yes; you can see the location history Google has been collecting at https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

But it's easy to stop collecting and/or delete location data; see https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687

Depends on whether you've opted into Location History or not, which is the master setting for most of Google's persistent location-based features. You can check the setting here: https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

When you know you will need directions, you can also look them up on desktop using generic origin/destination cities and emailing them to yourself on a non-Gmail email account.

Both location history and the notifications can be easily turned off on Android and Maps app. What do you mean about lack of control?

It's "upsetting" (a strong word not used in the post) to new users because the default is "on" and that's the first impression they get when they turn the device on. Which is the sound of Google blowing it and sending people back to the Apple ecosystem, not necessarily the sound of someone crying.

> I don't understand the point of the blog post then. Why is it so upsetting, if you have the ability to turn it off?

I'm not sure the original author knows that they can be turned off.

... or perhaps (if I'm being less charitable) the original author doesn't care; they don't want to be asked in the first place, ever (and are a touch naive about exactly how it is Google Maps gets the data it can vend to end-users).

Default on is outrageous. It's clear the average person doesn't know how to access and manage even some of these settings, much less understand what they do or be able to understand what privacy violations will continue despite turning something off in one place.

You are explicitly asked about that feature when settinng up your phone for the first time.

Many non-technical types just have the store staffer walk through those steps, and others aren't likely to understand the implications of those settings.

They can hardly complain to Google when the device doesn't behave as desired then.

They should complain to the store staffer or make some effort to find out what those settings the are enabled actually do.

And that is why they default to on. If they defaulted to off, no one would turn it on, and they wouldn’t be able to hoover up the data.

Because if you turn it off in one place, it just starts happening in another:

Yah. I disabled Google Maps tracking, then Google Search started notifying me about places I was near.

It's not Google Maps that's doing the tracking. He turned off notifications in Google Maps, not location history, which does the actual tracking that other apps consume.

He agreed to location tracking when he first set up the phone because the first run setup explicitly asks whether he wants that on or off.

A harder, deeper question, is whether the average user is informed enough about "location history" to know whether they want that on or off, and whose responsibility it should be to inform them.

... as a wise man once observed, people talk a long game about how important their privacy is, but then empirically, researchers continue to discover you can get people to divulge a lot of personal information for a Snickers bar, if not less (survey-takers who just stand around in malls and ask people to fill out clipboards are an example of this---and while they are a dying breed, they're a dying breed because it's cheaper now to collect that information online, not because people have gotten cagier about divulging it).

Google are miles ahead of the other big players in terms of transparency and user control. They actively prompt users to review their privacy settings. They provide a plain-English guide to what data they collect and a simple process to choose your privacy settings.

I do find Google's level of data collection a bit creepy, but I also don't see how they could reduce the amount of data they collect without reducing the quality of their service.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6227261

https://privacy.google.com/your-data.html

https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup

  They actively prompt users to review their privacy settings.

And yet I've found with multiple Android updates on multiple devices, they can reset things like Location Services back to "On/Fine" and othere things like enable NFC without telling you that it's happened.

I believe that is the current state of affairs. Notifications can be suppressed in Android apps, right?

Yeah, but in this case that might also disable the notifications of Google Maps navigation. That's why I simply tolerated the occasional nag until today, when this panicky article prompted me to dig a little deeper. Took all of one minute to get rid of the location spam.

> I don't understand the point of the blog post then. Why is it so upsetting, if you have the ability to turn it off?

Because people like to complain. Especially when they're getting a free service (as in money).