Several media outlets are reporting today that an investigation by AP has revealed that Google devices continue to track users even after they pause their Location History.
Features such as Google Maps and weather updates automatically use location data, regardless of your current location settings.
This begs the question – how is the data being used? We can, for example, target Google Ad campaigns at particular geographic areas, so presumably this data could be used to improve the effectiveness of that aspect of the system.
Google made no mention of monetising the data in their response to the investigation:
“As the story notes, we make sure Location History users know that when they disable the product, we continue to use location to improve the Google experience when they do things like perform a Google search or use Google for driving directions.”
Of course, we have no way of knowing if that particular set of data is monetised, but given that Google masked keyword data replacing it with “not provided”, under the guise of user privacy, one would think there are more than a few SEO veterans rolling their eyes at this particular story.
The loss of keyword data in analytics was a tough change for the industry and really served to diminish the marketing efforts of individual businesses (while funnelling more people to the Adwords Keyword Tool). To this day we still have to explain to clients why that data is no longer available.
But at least I get daily weather alerts on my phone I didn’t ask for.
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