With such high technology being carried around in pockets, it is not surprising that lack of privacy is a given side-effect of modern life. One of the most invasive of these is location tracking. Even if location history is switched off on your smartphone, Google often still knows exactly where you are at all times. Something as everyday as connecting to the Internet means you’re assigned an IP address (which is geographically mappable). With smartphones, you’re also connected to cell towers for connectivity, so your carrier might discover your general location at any time. If you want to preserve your location privacy… 

For Any Device:

  1. Open your browser to myactivity.google.com and log into your Google account
  2. Click on “Activity Controls”
  3. Turn off “Web & App Activity”
  4. Turn off “Location History”

Please keep in mind that disabling these will result in reduced features for the Google Assistant and the Google Home smart speaker.

For iOS (Google Maps app):

  1. Open the “Settings” app
  2. Select “Privacy” 
  3. Open “Location Services” 
  4. Scroll down to “Google Maps” 
  5. Change the Location settings to “While Using” from the dropdown menu

In the Safari web browser, which is the default iOS browser, you can switch to another search engine (Bing or DuckDuckGo). To turn off location tracking while browsing — 

  1. Open the “Settings” app
  2. Select “Privacy” 
  3. Open “Location Services” 
  4. Scroll down to “Safari Websites” 
  5. Change the location setting to “Never”. 

Please keep in mind that this will not prevent advertisers from accessing your IP address. 

You also have the option to turn off Location Services entirely: 

  1. Once again, open the “Settings” app to “Privacy” and then “Location Services” 
  2. Toggle the slider to “Off”

For Android: 

  1. Open the “Settings” app
  2. Select “Security and Location” 
  3. Under the “Privacy” heading, tap on “Location”. This can be switched off for the entire device. 

To turn off location tracking for specific app, you will need to use “App-level permissions” to turn the option off for each individual app. Another good idea would be to use a search engine other than Google, which is an option available even in Google Chrome. 

If you wish to delete the logs of past location tracking: 

  1. Open myactivity.google.com from a web browser
  2. Click on “Details” beside the Location Pin icon
  3. Select “From your current location” in the pop-window
  4. From here, you have two options:
    1. Click on the navigation icon (three vertical dots) and select “Delete”
    2. Some items are grouped by category (names, google.com, Search, Maps, etc). Each of these will need to be deleted individually. 

How you preserve your own privacy is up to you. Tech companies are working on more privacy features with every new firmware and hardware update, but there are always loopholes that other companies will exploit. It is always a good idea, therefore, to keep your device software updated to the latest version and check periodically if there any new options or features you can (de)activate to have and control the experience you want.