Google’s personal privacy settings have always been a headache for many users. For example, in many cases, turning off the positioning function is not completely “turned off“, but is turned off under certain conditions. Even after turning off, the system still has a way to know “where are you”. According to a recent document published in court, not only ordinary users, but even some employees, engineers, and even senior employees within Google are confused about these settings.
The lawsuit was filed by the Arizona Attorney General in May, aims to investigate the Google service users pause “historical position” is set, the message will still save the user’s position reports.
In this newly submitted document, a Google employee wrote:
“The current UI interface seems to be relatively easy to understand, but at the same time it is difficult for users to understand what the above means.”
Regarding the aforementioned report that Google saves location history after users deactivate it, some Google employees also agreed in the document that they believe that turning off location should be turned off completely, not only under specific circumstances.”
A Google spokesperson told The Verge, “We have already built privacy controls into our services, and our team is constantly discussing and improving them. As far as location information is concerned, we have heard the feedback and have been working hard to improve our privacy controls. In fact, even these selected excerpts clearly show that the team’s ultimate goal is to reduce confusion about the location history setting.”
Although Google has made changes before this, it still appears to be insufficient for the current situation. For example, Google will push personalized ads for users, and personalization involves location services. Users can manually stop the push of personalized ads, but Google will still assume that the user is within 3 kilometers of precise positioning and continue to push ads.
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