I actually love location history. Makes it easy to answer questions like: "what was the name of that great restaurant in Edinburgh when I visited 4 years ago?"
I have nothing against tracking your own location and keeping records of it yourself; but it's an entirely different thing when a company which arguably has more power than the governments of multiple countries does it by default and keeps the records on its servers.
> Location History is a Google account setting that is off by default
Android still by default "shares" location with Google. That setting is merely to turn off storing that data on Google's side. Unless they get a warrant compelling them to keep it. And unless they are lying, again:
Someone really ought to sue Google so that during discovery Google will be compelled to speak the truth. The amount of confusion in this issue is immense. And tech publications like ZDNet is part of the problem. Conflating concepts like tracking vs collecting, not to mention the distinction between anonymous, pseudonymous, and tied-to-account tracking. In this particular article the title "tracking" clearly doesn't match the article's content where the Google spokesperson says "so that data was immediately discarded". Is Google lying about this? I think only a legal discovery will find out.
This has already happened, and entered some glorious emails into the public record, like Google engineers stating they'd find their location history settings confusing, despite being basically an expert in the field.
Apple still creates a relational database of iPhone user location by default too, I don't think this is a terribly surprising practice. I don't like either company doing it, but something tells me that they don't have a choice.
I have not looked at this for a while, but Google used to tie location search history which is valuable to users with location collection which is mostly valuable to Google. There is probably a perfectly good engineering explanation why, but it's hard to unsee abuse of market domination to track location data angle.
Maybe it was at one time, but it is very easy nowadays. It can be setup in many ways. https://growyourown.services/beginners-guide-to-nextcloud/
Mine runs on a Raspberry PI with many services on the yunohost.org platform. I love it.
That is a very emotional argument --but I accept that you could opt in to it. On the other hand, you might instead discover a new or different restaurant experience you would not have otherwise. Which, of course, could be better or worse.