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President’s Message You can go to Google Account Help screen,
Google My Activity -→ Activity Controls, which
gives a page with options for turning features

By Jeff Wilkinson, President, Sun City Summerlin on or off. Google claims to use this infor-
Computer Club, NV mation to personalize and enhance your ex-
perience across all of Google Services.
September 2018 issue, The Gigabyte Gazette
I don’t recall agreeing to all these tracking ser-
www.scscc.org
vices when I installed Chrome, but I may
pres.scscc (at) gmail.com have, or, as I suspect, the default setting is

Computer Club and Friends: on. But Google still is able to track you
through your use of Google Maps, weather
At the Computer Club’s weekly Kaffee Klatch updates, or Google searches.
session, longtime member Captain Jack (Jack
Spargo) brought up an interesting, and to If you Pause Web and App Activity, Google
many, unknown feature of the Android mobile lets you know that you “…. may limit or disa-
operating system. ble more personalized experiences across
Google services.” Even when paused, Google
Apparently when logged in on an Android de- may temporarily use recent search infor-
vice, iPhone, or iPad device, Google tracks mation ostensibly to improve the quality of
your GPS coordinates, nearby Wi-Fi networks, your search experience.
barometric pressure, and even takes a guess
at your current activity. Jack recounted how he
had discovered, somewhat by accident, that a
recent trip to Canada was tracked, complete
with stops and locations annotated.

So, after the meeting, I went home and took a
look at my own activity, as obtained from my
Samsung Galaxy S7 phone. Low and behold,
there was a recent trip to the Bay Area com-
plete with all my stops in Sunnyvale, San Jo-
se, and San Francisco.

Location History, while not turned on by de-
fault, is part of Google Maps, Photos, Google
Assistant, and the Google Chrome browser.
And you can opt out of location history, alt-
hough it is a number of screens deep in the While not all bad, this location tracking does
phone’s settings for the Google App. Look for allow targeted advertising and more precise
Data and Personalization tabs. directions or responses to inquiries looking for

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