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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

> Turning off location history in Google and Apple Maps

Google dark patterns make this a no-go. I have multiple locations stored on my Google maps. With location history turned off I was fine until a few months ago when maps told me in order to access that data I need to turn location history back on. So google cripples their software unless you turn on tracking.

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This. Google maps becomes quite hostile&annoying to use if you deny that data access.

Maps, thankfully isn't as necessary as it used to be. OSM is getting better, and Maps hasn't. It's less usable and keeps trying to shove businesses in my face.

In one of the older versions of google maps having location turned off meant that the app wouldn't accept any input since a notification 'Turn on your location' kept repeatedly coming up somehow blocking everything. Effectively rendered the app unusable.

Use alternative maps -

https://en.mapy.cz/, https://maps.me/ - Google Maps is useless anyway.

> Google Maps is useless anyway

Care to elaborate on that? It seems very useful, considering the amount of people that use it on a daily basis

Here (HereWeGo) maps as well. I use it when I need an offline map.

I see it as part of the exchange. You give them your data they give you nice products. If you decide to use it without giving, you get a lower quality product.

AFAIK according to GDPR this (to hold non related features hostage) is specifically not allowed.

"don't store my data" but also "store the data I want you to store for the features I cherry picked" probably doesn't work under gdpr.

Of course it does. Gdpr is about explicit consent. Don't track my movements 24/7 but let me save places on the map is not a hard thing to comply with.

Who says they are unrelated? Providing access to your location data and history can enable a lot of very useful features that aren't possible without it.

Yep. And that would be OK with GDPR again AFAIK.

But in this case it seems clearly wrong.

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