How to prevent Google Maps from keeping a record of all our movements

Location Google Maps

Google has a long and controversial history of its practices to obtain personal information about its users. The company has long lost that halo of altruism with which it surrounded itself when developing products to improve the lives of users (which have many and very useful). With this background, many users can find themselves quite uncomfortable with the fact that Google Maps tracks their location and keeps a history on all the movements that occur throughout the day. If you do not want Google to collect constant data about your location during each day, we will tell you how to deactivate this function in a few steps.

The problem with Google's location history is that Maps doesn't need to be actively working . Even when we have the application running in the background on our phone, the smartphone periodically collects data about our situation. If you want to know how far this information reaches, just go to the Google Location History page . We did the test and the truth is that the precision with which the movements of each day are known is disturbing.

Google dont be evil

If it bothers you that a record of your movements remains, there are several ways to end this count. In a first step, you can delete the history from the location history page itself (the link that we have presented above). To do this, just click on the option "Delete all history". If what we want is to eliminate the content of a certain period of time we must mark the option of "Show" and then a maximum of 30 days.

In the event that we want to prevent our movements from being recorded on the phone from now on, we have to go to the Google Maps application . In the case of Android , we must click on the icon of the three horizontal bars on the left side of the screen. Then, you have to click on the "Settings" option . Within the menus that appear we must access the option “Google location settings”. The next step should take us to "Google Location Reports". In this last screen we can see how there are two different options. The first one is the "Location Reports".We can disable this feature, but it could make Maps work worse . The most balanced solution is the second option, “Location History” . In case we deactivate this function Google will stop recording our movements in the history.

The way to deactivate the collection of our movements on the iPhone or iPad is similar. You have to go to the location settings of the application within the privacy menu and disable all services. These are simple steps that can help us maintain more privacy. At the end of the day, we already live in a constant showcase on sites such as social networks or when conducting our searches.