Google’s privacy options can be confusing for many users, for whom properly configuring all of the company’s services and products can be very difficult. Location, search history, Google Assistant … there are a lot of options to manage and configure, which can be inconvenient.
According to research, Google was collecting information from users even after they turned off location history
However, this is difficult to manage not only for users of search engine products. It’s also something that It costs Google’s own engineers. Not even they have a good understanding of how privacy is managed by Google products as it became known during a lawsuit in Arizona, USA.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich sued Google in court last May after the Associated Press investigated in 2018 how some Google apps had disabled location history despite everything on iOS and Android.
Following the investigation, various Google employees voluntarily contacted the authorities and their statements have now been made public. One of them claims that the UI for Google’s options appears to be designed to enable things “while being complicated enough” to be obscure to users.
In the documents now released, another contributor can be read who claims that the investigation is more than justified and that “stopping the location should do just that unconditionally”. This has led Brnovich’s team to claim that even top Google engineers don’t understand everything about how user data is collected.
For their part, Google confirms they are doing everything they can to work with the attorney general, adding that Google’s privacy policy applies subject to constant review and changewhich has led to a simplification in recent years.
