Google location services makes the picture much worse though, which the majority of Android users (in the US at least) have enabled.

Yes, it feels really spooky getting notifications to review the supermarket, coffee shop or anything else close to our surroundings.

The spookiness is even greater for those of us that know what it means to live under repressive regimes.

Google maps stalking is indeed bad and I hate it but you can easily disable it by not running Maps in the background.

Honestly Android allows me to tune out of the internet business model a lot easier than iOS. Just dive into permissions and install a system wide adblocker. You can even bypass the app store.

I always have location off but my old coworker used to leave hers on. One day after work we were waiting for the bus she took a picture of some grafitti near the bus stop. A minute later she got a notification from google asking if they could, I can't remember if it was, tag the picture or add the picture on google maps or both for the gas station next to the bus stop. It was fairly creepy, i'd never seen one of those before. She started turning her location off after that.

I must say, now that Google is buying people's credit card purchase history from third party data brokers, their behavior is much more creepy than just tracking your location.

>Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-...