> Anyone who was not in the area will be excluded from the list, therefore letting the police know where I wasn't at the time.

No, at best this only shows that your google linked device (presumably a phone) did not have location information for that area at the specific time.

Alternatively it suggests the device could have been switched off/disconnected from the network to hide your presence - making you really a suspect of interest if your name comes into the investigation for some reason.

Dragnet approaches to law enforcement are inherently wrong. They unreasonably cast suspicion on everyone without any good basis and reverse the accepted safeguard that your guilt requires to be proven, and replace it with the idea that you require to prove your innocence.

"...Alternatively it suggests the device could have been switched off/disconnected from the network to hide your presence - making you really a suspect of interest if your name comes into the investigation for some reason..."

That's really interesting. If I'm understanding you correctly, people who routinely switch off their location services, could potentially end up as suspects in crimes if they, for instance, live in the apartment across the hall from the victim or something.

So keeping location services on let's the police keep tabs on you, potentially making you a suspect in some crime in the future. Alternatively, turning it off potentially turns you into a suspect of interest in some potential crime in the future.

Welcome to police logic!

Sounds like you agree entirely with the poster's final comment :

"They unreasonably cast suspicion on everyone without any good basis and reverse the accepted safeguard that your guilt requires to be proven, and replace it with the idea that you require to prove your innocence."

What about a situation where, say, 4 bank robberies happen and it is suspected to be the same person. Would it be reasonable to intersect cell phone records looking for someone who was present for all 4? Not sure if that officially counts as a dragnet if only we need result I s expected

While I understand your point, and think it's a valid privacy concern, the reasoning about leaking info on all of Google's users doesn't make sense. If I install a security camera in my room, I'm not leaking information about you if it shows you're not here. There was no expectation of the possibility of that in the first place, so no information is leaked. This is only leaking information about the Google users who are reasonably likely to be within the radius where the query is executed. So perhaps a couple thousand users, (so a legit privacy concern) but not all of them.