I've turned it off, but I found out that it removes a very useful feature: I can no longer set a home or work address. Why is this? You could've easily just stored those two addresses and not track everything else. They are clearly incentivizing the user to turn on activity tracking. Now instead of just typing in 'home', I have to input the entire address.

Yes, this bugs me too. They are also discouraging users like me from using maps at all, which is fine. Their app, their rules. maps.me, here we go maps and osmand all work reasonably well. Sometimes they aren't very good at finding addresses, but you can usually get the coordinates from an address using a separate tool or a web-search.

You also cant use the Google Assistant on your phone without turning on the Voice & Web Activity afaik. Its terrible. I switched to DuckDuckGo and dont care much about giving up some convenient features anymore.

Does turning it off stop the data collection, or just remove it from view?

>You can use your Activity controls to choose what kinds of activity are saved to your Google Account. These settings apply on all devices that are signed in to your account. You can change these settings and view or delete your saved activity at any time.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6139018

>YOUR Google Account (emphasis mine).

This says nothing of internal tracking, and the data is certainly being sent to multiple google services.

I’m not complaining. I love the feature!