As our dependence on electronic devices increases, from ordering food to paying bills and hailing cab services and making use of online maps to travel to different destinations, the unseeing eyes are also following us everywhere tracking our every move.
We all know of GPS tracking when hailing a cab but did you know that you are being tracked at all times? By having the smartphone with you at all times, with the ‘Location’ being turned ‘on’, every move is being tracked. Some might not worry about this constant tracking by strange individuals, but I do think that it is necessary to know all the possibilities that are present before forming our own conclusions about them.
It is quite a possibility that you will be using ‘Google maps’ for taking you to different places and you might be signed onto multiple devices using the same ‘gmail’ account. While, it looks perfectly harmless and seems that your life is getting simplified in every way in this electronic era – the reverse is unfortunately true.
How you are being tracked:
As an example, sign into your Google account and click on ‘Maps’ in the right hand corner. Once inside Google Maps, click on the menu and pick ‘Your timeline’. Now, you can see all the places you have visited in the last couple of years! You can also see the time of visit, the duration of visit,the latitude and longitude of the places that you visited! In addition, all these details are visible for a prolonged period of time too!
You might have visited 100 places over a period of 5 years and chances are all of them might be listed right there on the screen! You may have forgotten where you went in October of 2017, but your device and ‘Location history’ does not forget!
So, what can be done?
If you would like to delete all of your location data and prevent your location from being saved in the future, follow the steps below:
- After clicking on ‘Timeline’, click ‘Manage Location History’, disable ‘Location History’ under ‘Activity controls’. This makes sure that future Location tracking is disabled.
- In order to delete previous ‘Locations’ go to ‘Timeline’ and under the settings tab click on ‘Delete all Location history’
Once this is completed, your Location history will neither be visible to you or anybody else(at,least for some time!) In today’s age, with so much information and power in our hands, it is up to us to do all the homework and control the data that is exposed to the outside world by disabling the various settings.
Here’s to a “track free” world… 🙂