this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Yes they track your phone's location and movement constantly, but it's not a secret.
For an example of the evidence you seek... Google SensorVault location data was how they identified and convicted the January 6 terrorists. You might argue that complying with warrants isn't misuse of the data, but I'd argue that both the data itself, and the level of precision and detail, shouldn't be captured and logged in the first place. And I'm fairly sure that most google customers have no idea how pervasive and extensive the tracking is.
The SensorVault data is "just" the Google Maps Timeline data though, right? Which people have always been able to turn on and off, if they knew about it.
I feel like Google not really respecting a concept of user consent and pretending people agree to poorly-publicized and often-modified tracking programs is a different, and, frankly, weirder, privacy problem than there being closed source stuff running with high permissions. If you could revoke permissions from Play Services, or if it was source available or even free software, that wouldn't solve the problem because it would still be able to do stuff Google had manufactured consent for it to do.