Anyone with a modern smartphone knows that there will always be some level of tracking capability involved. Carriers can measure relative signal strength to their local towers and get a rough triangulation on your position. It’s the price we pay for being able to talk to virtually anyone, any time, anywhere in the world.
But Google takes this tracking to the extreme. Yes, they sell Android phones, which is over 70% of the worldwide cell phone market. But even folks who are just using Google’s desktop apps or websites are being subjected to an unreal amount of snooping from the mega corp.
This article will discuss just a few of the most common Google tracking methods, and your best options for turning them off.
What Google Tracking Methods Are Most Common?
Entire books could be written on the subject of Google tracking methods. But let’s try to take things in the most logical order possible, covering 95% of the scenarios most people face.
Google Tracking – Hardware
Let’s start with the hardware since that’s the hardest layer to deal with.
Android Device Location Tracking: It’s no secret that Google tracking starts with their popular Maps application. But half a dozen other apps and features also use your phone’s location data to do what they do: Find Your Phone, Emergency Location Service, Location Sharing, Location Accuracy, Location History, Google Reviews, Earthquake Alerts, WiFi Scanning, and Bluetooth Scanning.
As it turns out, Google tracking is integral to any of the ‘diary’ type activities that are so popular on Android. And of course, anything that needs a sense of how close you are to other things.
The first place to disable many of these Google tracking options is from the My Activity panel. According to Google, turning off the Location History option will have the following impact on your apps:
- Your phone’s location isn’t shared with any apps.
- Features that use location may not work properly.
- Google Location Accuracy won’t collect data to improve location-based services.
- You can get search results and ads based on information such as your IP address.
- You can’t see where your phone is if you lose it.
- You can’t share your phone’s location with anyone via Google Maps.
- Your device can still send location to first responders in an emergency.
- You can’t get earthquake alerts for earthquakes nearby.
In addition, you’ll need to turn off WiFi Scanning and Bluetooth Scanning from your phone’s control panel. Though accessing these settings is different depending on your Android version, generally swiping down from the top of the screen twice will get you there. Otherwise, use the Settings app to granularly control these features.
Finally, if you want to wipe out your past history, you need to open Google Maps. Tap your profile picture, then More, then Settings and Privacy. Scroll down to Location Settings and tap Delete All Location History
If you want to temporarily avoid all tracking, even emergency tracking… take the battery out of the phone. Yes, seriously. Passive and safety controls on these devices, as well as backdoors, insisted upon by some governments, allow remote operators to turn features on even if the phone is ‘off’. These capabilities were leaked by Snowden. Creepily known as the ‘Noisy Smurf’ attacks, they work on just about every phone brand on the planet. These backdoors are simply built into most of the phones you can buy over the counter. So if you really want to avoid tracking for a while, take the battery out of the phone.
Google Tracking – Software
Now we can move on to the ways Google tracks you online.
Remember that Google tracking extends to all of their services: Search, Gmail, YouTube, Docs, and more. They track you via ‘first party’ cookies, IP address, browser fingerprint, and GPS document metatags.
Let’s start with GPS tagging. Google tracking software embeds location information into photos, no matter what device you take them with. You need to turn this off in two places: If you use the Google Camera app, go to More, Settings, Save Location, and turn that off. Then in Google Photos, go to Menu, Settings, and toggle Remove Geo Location.
Now let’s opt out from as much as we can. Head back to the My Activity panel and turn off Web And App Activity as well as YouTube History. You can go into the submenus and be more specific if you only want to turn off ‘some’ tracking. Explore the options as you see fit, but to eliminate their permission to track, these must be turned off entirely.
The rest of the Google tracking methods are harder to shake. If you want to use their services for free, you ‘pay’ with a certain amount of information. And that includes agreeing to share your IP address and use their first-party cookies so that they can feed their advertising network. Nothing is really free.
So a third-party app is required to obscure your IP address, and browser fingerprint, and make those first-party cookies less useful as a tracking mechanism. An example of such an app would be Hoody. It’s a browser add-on that automatically creates fake profiles and changes your broadcasted IP address to mess with geolocation options. It also obscures your browser settings to make your web browser’s fingerprint less unique. Head to AmIUnique for a second to see just how that works, then come back for our grand summary.
Dealing With Miscellaneous Google Tracking
Some things should be obvious: If you have any Google Home appliance like Google Nest, Google Chromecast, or anything similar: You’ve opted into Google tracking. Heck, you’ve opted into Google listening for voice commands, tracking your entertainment, and getting involved with your home security!
You can limit this somewhat. Go into your Chromecast Settings in the Google Home app. Then turn off ‘Help Improve Chromecast’. Then go to your Google Device Privacy settings in your Data And Privacy control panel. In the Voice and Audio section, you can limit how much Google Nest services listen to, and opt out of customer service improvement options.
That covers the most common Google tracking methods. For some people, that will take care of everything. And for others who have entwined their lives with Google, using GMail, Android phones, Docs, and dozens of Google apps… it may be the tip of the iceberg. Be careful out there!