Google claims that if you turn off the ‘Location History’ setting on your device, the company will not be able to store information about where you have been. The company states on its support page, that you can turn off Location History “at any time” and that, with the setting turned off, “the places you go are no longer stored.” But that’s not true, the AP report says, because some Google apps continue to store time-stamped location data even when the ‘Location History’ setting is switched off – without asking for permission.

Peter Lenz, a senior geospatial analyst at advertising technology company Dstillery said that Google’s obsession with tracking user locations is all to do with advertising revenue. “They build advertising information out of data,” he said. “More data for them presumably means more profit.” The AP’s findings were confirmed by computer-science researchers at Princeton University.