A guide to keeping your mobile phone's location history private
Carrying a phone with a GPS chip turned on means that location history is potentially being recorded. In this guide, we'll take you through steps you can take to minimise how much you share your location history with your phone manufacturer and other parties.
In your day-to-day life, your smartphone silently captures and stores a digital footprint of your whereabouts by keeping a location history: this history is then used to enhance your mobile experience, such as by aiding in navigation and customizing app experiences according to your location habits.
Yet, it's essential to recognize the potential risks tied to this seemingly innocuous practice. Understanding how your location data is handled becomes vital, as it can impact your privacy in ways you might not have considered. Particularly, you should be aware of the following concerns:
- Cloud vulnerabilities: Data stored by your Operating System or cloud provider: It’s too easy for your location data to be leaked, shared, or ‘backed-up’ by companies. When your location history is stored by a company, it poses a potential risk if the service is compromised (e.g. a data breach). Unauthorized access to this location data can reveal your detailed movement patterns, potentially leading to stalking, harassment, or other malicious activities.
- Local device compromise: Even if your location history is kept on your device only, it still poses a privacy risk. If your mobile device is compromised, whether through theft, hacking, or taken by force (e.g. at border control), an attacker can retrieve your stored location history. This provides them with a detailed record of your past movements and most frequently visited places, which may then be used against you.
- Third-party app misuse: Some third-party apps may request access to location data for seemingly innocuous purposes but can misuse this information for targeted advertising, profiling, or sharing or selling your data to third parties without the user's explicit consent. In these cases, typically, the operating system provides a way for you to limit app access to your location data.
- Government surveillance: Government agencies may seek or demand access to your location history to track your movements, infringing on human rights and posing risks to personal safety. To get access, governments could demand access to your device and extract location data stored there; or demand data from app or mobile or operating system providers, purchase data third parties like data brokers; or even generate an app of their own that then gains access to your location.
- Data aggregation and inference: Aggregating location data from various sources can enable the creation of a detailed user profile, allowing companies or adversaries to infer sensitive information about an individual's habits, preferences, and lifestyle, leading to potential privacy violations.
As location tracking becomes increasingly integrated into our digital lives, understanding and managing the associated privacy risks are crucial for protecting your privacy. The rest of this guide explains how to disable this feature on both Android and iOS.
Android
If you have a Google account associated with your Android device, chances are your location history is being stored. Recently, Google decided it will soon stop storing your location history on the cloud: however, it is still stored on your device, posing a potential privacy risk.
To disable location history, go to your Google account settings. You can do so by visiting this link, opening the settings app on your device, or using the Google app. In the account settings, find the Data & privacy tab.
Scroll down until you see the History settings section. Click on Location History, and then disable it. This should prevent Google from collection your location history and storing it on their servers and your device.
iOS
Unlike Google, Apple keeps most of your location history on your device: the bits of information stored in the cloud are either end-to-end encrypted, meaning only you can decipher them, or anonymized. As such, the risk of having your location history compromised by a data breach, or by a request from law enforcement to Apple for this data, is greatly reduced. However, as we explained earlier, having your location history stored on your device(s) still poses a privacy risk.
To disable location history, go to Settings > Privacy > Location services and then scroll down until you find the System services option.
In the System services screen, you can select which system applications have access to your location. To prevent location history from being stored on your iCloud-connected devices, select the Significant locations option.
In this screen, you can see an overview of your location history and your most frequently-visited places. Start by clearing the history by clicking the Clear History button on the bottom of the page. Finally, to disable the storage of location history, toggle the Significant Locations option at the top of the page.
Note that if you use any Google service, tied to your Google account, on your iOS device (e.g. Google Maps), you should follow the same steps in the previous section, to prevent location history from being stored in your Google account.
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