Why does Google want to know my location

Google is very big on location tracking. So big, in fact, that a study conducted by Princeton University has confirmed that the company still records your location even when the "Location History" setting has been turned off. Therefore, a question arrises: why does Google want to know my location so badly that it's even prepared to potentially break the law?

Well, the reason why your location is so interesting to Google is very simple. The company provides tons of free content and extremely useful high-quality services, such as web search, language translations and GPS navigation. However, as you know, nothing comes free in life. Therefore, in exchange, the company collects as much personal data from you as possible.

Google then sells this data to advertisers. The more detailed the data is, the more highly personalised and relevant ads they can deliver to you. The more relevant are the ads are, the more likely that you would click on them, which will bring you once step closer to buying their products and services. As the advertisers get paid, so does Google.

You may have thought that you could easily opt out of sending your location to Google, but you were probably wrong. You can turn your location off in the settings on an Android device. This switches off the phone's GPS, but it will not prevent the data from being sent to Google. Your position can still be determined by the process of triangulation, which works by assessing the strength of the signal from the three nearby cellular transmitters. However, if you don't switch location setting off, then your location will be recorded even if you put your device on Airplane Mode. This is because GPS receiver does not necessarily use the same channels as used for the rest of your mobile data. The only difference that it will make is that it will not send location data to Google straight away; It will only do so when you enable the network connection again.

Likewise, even if you didn't mind your location being tracked in real time, perhaps you didn't want to record it into history? Of course, you could prevent this from happening by going to myactivity.google.com, navigating to "Activity controls" and turning off "Location history", right? Well, the above-mentioned research confirmed that it's not enough. It appears that you would also need to disable "Web & App Activity" to actually disable the location history. Makes you wonder what the purpose of that toggle button next to the "Location history" setting is.

The good news is, however, that you can easily delete your existing location history if you want. Perhaps, the deletion only happens for yourself and the history still remains on Google servers, but you can give it the benefit of the doubt. The link below will explain how to do it.