I disagree. Things may be different in the EU, but for every feature that triggered the "enable location history" popup, it made a lot of sense to require it. And, most importantly, you can just turn it off and everything important keeps working.
You can disable the "send a list of nearby cell towers to Google's live database" setting, the "send a list of Bluetooth beacons to Google's live database" setting, and the "send a list of WiFi networks to Google's live database" setting, all without losing location access. Your location access will become a lot slower, but that's just a consequence of having to rely on GPS again, like we did before all of these extra features became available.
Google is even making their location history feature worse because they don't like how many blanket location history requests they're receiving from authorities, by moving location history to be stored on-device.
For years Google lied about consent users supposedly gave for some types of location tracking, but after they got found out (and the authorities got involved) they changed their tune.
There is so much stuff Chrome sends to Google though. I was curious how their autofill implementation works and... there is code to send a list of all form and field names to a Google API. That alone could be sensitive information.
>For years Google lied about consent users supposedly gave for some types of location tracking, but after they got found out (and the authorities got involved) they changed their tune.
And I will never trust google again after that with my person important data! No matter what day do now!
You can disable the "send a list of nearby cell towers to Google's live database" setting, the "send a list of Bluetooth beacons to Google's live database" setting, and the "send a list of WiFi networks to Google's live database" setting, all without losing location access. Your location access will become a lot slower, but that's just a consequence of having to rely on GPS again, like we did before all of these extra features became available.
Google is even making their location history feature worse because they don't like how many blanket location history requests they're receiving from authorities, by moving location history to be stored on-device.
For years Google lied about consent users supposedly gave for some types of location tracking, but after they got found out (and the authorities got involved) they changed their tune.