Google could be tracking your every move and store the data on your account without your knowledge. The tech giant's feature, Location History, is a comprehensive data of all the places you've been to over the past years. The company's context-driven information is just going to get richer and richer, and if privacy is important to you, there's a way to turn it off and be stalker-free.
Tracked by your smartphone's GPS, your phone could be harboring data about all your visits to a certain cafe, or the routes you take going from point A to point B. Why does the behemoth company equip your phone with this stalkerish feature? It's actually essential in powering some important features on your phone such as automatic commute predictions and improved search results.
Essentially, Google's AI-powered engine learns the places you normally go to and proactively gives you suggestions on where you might enjoy going next. It also provides traffic notifications, helps you remember where you were on a given day, and search a place you've visited but didn't make a note of its address. On the other hand, it could be used to feed you customized adverts, which you might find annoying.
Worst case scenario, it might make you feel uncomfortable to the fact that you're giving a giant tech company a huge amount of information about your private life for free. According to The Sun, here's how you know you've been spied on by the company: check out your Timeline when logged into your account. If you want to turn it off, look for Location Services on your phone settings and deactivate it.
If you want to delete all your Google Location history, according to Business Insider, you can do this too from here. If you don't want to entirely delete it, you can also select just specific time and dates that you want removed. However, the best way to fully stop it from accessing your location data is to turn off your GPS, since apps like Google Maps and Uber could still track you down.
