Google’s Privacy Controls are Confusing, Even to Their Engineers

Via Zdnet:

In court documents unsealed last week in Arizona, a (sadly unnamed) Google engineer offers this 2018 email about the company’s location tracking controls: “Location off should mean location off, not ‘except for this case or that case.’ The current UI feels like it is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won’t figure it out.”

Google is notorious for frequently changing its design and settings, and this impacts its privacy settings, too. In the case above, the engineer is referring to a situation where, even if you paused the “Location History” setting, Google would still track and store your location. You had to go into another screen elsewhere to actually turn that whole feature off.

Google has since changed this setting to be more clear, but not until an AP report kicked off a legal investigation.

If settings are confusing to the engineers behind a product, how could a company expect us as users to really understand them? Google, of course, benefits greatly from our confusion. The more information they can get from us, the more targeted advertising they can sell.