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Comment by amaccuish | Hacker News Reader

No one was expecting it to disable tracking, you do that by disabling Location Services. What they did expect was that Google would stop saving their location to Google's servers, but no, you have to also tend to some other seemingly unrelated toggle (from the article "Some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other services, like Search and Maps.")

Also, if I turn of location history on my phone, Maps won't show me what I last searched for. Has Google forgotten how to store locally? I don't mind my device saving my location, what I don't want is it being stored on servers out of my control. Google knew exactly what they were doing here, and pretty forcefully persuade you to not switch any of it off.

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Every article I read on this confused "location history" with "location services", if you are aware of the difference you shouldn't be surprised that location data is still being sent to their servers.

The Google experience is all about apps backed by the cloud, that's when their apps are at their max utility, I get why some people might not want that but that's no cause to ascribe malice to them.

I find the lack of granularity annoying. Your search history is generally less sensitive than your location, but both are bundled up in 'Web & App Activity'. There's no way to get Google to remember my search queries from my phone without it also creepily recalling every single location I brought my phone to. This feels almost like a dark pattern, like bundling a newsletter subscription when signing up to service.

But granularity is exactly what led to this outrage. Complex settings causing confusion. More granularity makes it worse.

I use google maps on iOS without logging into google — why can’t I see my recent search history reliably on the local device?

I feel like there’s a tipping point where “we have the strategy that data is delivered to/from the cloud” becomes a way to punish users who turn features off for privacy reasons ...

It's nearly double the work...

Most apps implementation (for example chrome) is to store all profile data in a local store, which then gets synced to the cloud, and to all other devices logged in as you.

If you switch off a privacy option, that simply switches off the saving of that data to the store. In turn, that means it doesn't get synced to the server.

An alternative implementation might be to still save the data to the store (so it's available for local use), but tag it in some way so it doesn't get synced. That proves very difficult though because then the store can become inconsistent, with some other contradictory data in the store in a part which does get synced, put there by the server or another device signed in as you.

You've managed to make a mountain out of a mole hill. I promise you you're way overthinking this.

And that's not how Chrome works at all. When you turn off sync, it just stops syncing up to Google, it's got nothing to do with local on-disk storage.

That's a different point, one I made on an earlier article here, that generic names like "location services" doesn't mean much to Jo user.

Solution, make "location history" mean location history. My mum knows that switching "Location" off on her phone turns of any tracking, she doesn't want that, she likes being able to check in on Facebook etc. When she started finding Google Maps creepy, and went looking to stop Google storing her location, but still be able to use Google Maps, she didn't know that turning off "Location History" doesn't exactly do what it says on the tin. Jo user isn't necessarily an idiot, but they don't know the ins and outs of Google tracking either.

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