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Comment by notzorbo3 | Hacker News Reader

Android's location tracking is a feature and I believe is not turned on automatically. Most of Windows 10's data collection serves no obvious purpose and is on by default. It's also 4 screens full of toggles that make you go "uh what?!"

But I wouldn't mind if they went after android for the purpose of making it clearer what's being tracked and gathered.

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"Android's location tracking is a feature and I believe is not turned on automatically."

It's not but they insist that you do in an unclear way every time you open google maps.

And when you disable location while it's in GPS-only mode and re-enable it, it defaults to the send-everything-to-Google mode.

I surely don't know, I only became aware of it, when Android suddenly started to ask me to submit reviews and pictures about my current location.

I turned Location History off and I _still_ get notifications asking me to submit reviews of the places I'm at. If anybody knows how to turn (seemingly) 24/7 location tracking off, please let me know.

Location History is something different I believe. It's whether Android / Google stores the history of places you've been too. It says nothing about whether it's doing things with your current location.

On Android 7.x:

Settings -> Location -> Recent location requests, tap each service, tap 'Permissions' and revoke the permissions for each app that has it.

Settings -> Location -> Location services, tap each service and disable everything.

That seems to fix it for me. Of course, at some random time in the future, Google will enable them again. I'm fairly certain I disabled this a few times already.

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