Investigation finds some Google apps on Android and iPhones automatically store time-stamped location data even when the location history setting is paused
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to.
Context & Ripple Effects
The AP's finding extends a pattern already visible in Google's own track record: a year earlier, Quartz reported Android phones were sending nearby cell tower addresses to Google even with location services disabled, forcing Google to commit to ending the practice. This investigation shows the same gap between what the settings promise and what the apps do now reaches iPhones too, not just Android.
The disclosure became the evidentiary backbone for later reckoning: court documents later detailed how deeply buried the off toggle was and how Google pressed partners like LG to match its defaults, and Australia's Federal Court ultimately ruled Google had misled Android users into believing turning location history off stopped collection. The retention-limit tool Google announced in 2019 reads as a direct response to this reporting arc.
First-order effects
- Users who paused location history on either platform learn their time-stamped movements were still being recorded by Google apps, invalidating the setting they relied on as the control.
- Google faces immediate pressure to reconcile its privacy controls with actual app behavior, after having just committed publicly to stopping the separate cell tower collection practice.
Second-order effects
- Regulators gain a template for deception claims built on the gap between toggle labels and data flows — the theory Australia's Federal Court later validated against Google.
- App developers collecting similar ambient location signals, as the CNET report found across thousands of high-install Android apps, face heightened scrutiny of whether their own disclosures match collection behavior.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, privacy controls shift from per-feature toggles toward retention limits and deletion tools — the direction of Google's own 2019 auto-delete rollout — because toggles alone prove unreliable as consent instruments.
- Location data becomes a recurring legal liability for platform owners rather than a free input: the court documents and rulings push collection practices from settings menus into litigation discovery, raising the cost of opaque defaults.
The trend: Mobile location tracking is moving from an era of opaque default collection toward externally enforced consent standards, with courts and investigations — not settings pages — defining what 'off' means.