Google's privacy settings have been a topic of debate due to the way it collects users' data . The settings are not only confusing for us users but for its employees too, as revealed via the internal documents that have been provided to a court for the Mountain View company's lawsuit on its collection of data. Read on to know more about it.
Google's confusing privacy settings
The newly-surfaced documents suggest that even the top-level Google employees fail to understand its privacy settings and the way it collects users' data. One of the Google employees stated, "The current UI feels like it is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won’t figure it out."
The documents were submitted in a lawsuit filed against Google by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich in May. The lawsuit deals with Google's unfair privacy policies and took shape after an investigative report published by 2018 Associated Press two years ago. The report found out that Google collected a user's location data on both Android and iOS even when the 'Location History' setting is disabled.
A Google employee agreed with the article and suggested in the internal documents that "Location off should mean location off; not except for this case or that case."
Google suggests that it is cooperating with the Arizona attorney general and is providing with all the information needed. The company, in a statement to Arizona Mirror, said, "Privacy controls have long been built into our services and our teams work continuously to discuss and improve them. In the case of location information, we’ve heard the feedback, and have worked hard to improve our privacy controls. In fact, even these cherry-picked published extracts state clearly that the team’s goal was to ‘Reduce confusion around Location History Settings’."
The main problem lied within Google's Web and App Activity' that had extra location-collecting settings. This led Google to improve changes to its privacy settings and recently introduced the option to auto-delete location and search history after 18 months.
To manage the Google privacy settings, you can head to Google's Activity Controls and choose what information should be included as saved activities, enable the auto-deletion option, tweak location history option, ad personalization, and more. Here's a link for the same to have a look at your settings and add changes accordingly.
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