Google's app privacy policy confuses even Google itself

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Judging from the internal documents that Google made public in the data collection lawsuit, their privacy policy was not only unclear to users, but even their own engineers were confused.

"The current UI feels like it's designed to make things possible, but it's too difficult for people to understand." Google employees acknowledged Friday in internal emails made public as part of an ongoing consumer fraud lawsuit that some of their apps' location privacy settings are confusing and can be misleading.

The lawsuit was originally filed by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich in May, alleging that Google's data collection processes violated the state's Consumer Fraud Act; the new information in the unsealed documents was also first reported by the Arizona Mirror.

“Even senior Google employees do not understand the conditions under which Google collects location data,” Brnovich and his team wrote in the complaint.

The attorney general's office began investigating Google after an Associated Press article in 2018 revealed some of the ways Google tracks users' movements and the difficulty of removing those tracking permissions.

The article at the time revealed that Google services would store location data from a user's Android device or iPhone. Even if you turned off the "Location History" setting, some Google apps would still automatically store locations along with timestamps.

A Google employee said in documents released today that he agreed with the report: "Off location" should mean off location, no exceptions.

Documents show that after the AP report fell through, employees were working behind the scenes to try to change the user interface to make it easier for Google users to opt out of location sharing. However, one unnamed employee expressed their frustration after they thought their location tracking was turned off, only to find out it was not.

The documents released show that Google's privacy policy was carefully designed to allow an app that turns off location tracking to actually use location tracking information from another Google app.

“My understanding is that there is currently nothing that prevents one Google product (A) from using the location logged by another Google product (B) if that use is approved,” the unnamed employee said. “In fact, our iconic privacy policy was written in large part to support the use of cross-product data.”

Google said it is cooperating with the Arizona attorney general, providing documents and answering questions from investigators.

"Privacy controls are already built into our services, and our teams are constantly discussing and improving them," said Google spokesman Jose Castaneda.

“When it comes to location information, we’ve listened to feedback and worked hard to improve it. In fact, even these cherry-picked snippets make it clear that the team’s goal is to ‘reduce confusion about location history settings,’ ” he said.

Google's move to hide additional location settings in "Web and App Activity" caused outrage, an action that ultimately led to Google's revamping of its privacy toggles. Small changes over the past few years have culminated in Google's current policy of automatically deleting location and search history for new users. Current users still need to visit their activity controls page to change their settings.

But while Google has made changes, it's clear there's more it can do. Documents from the Arizona lawsuit make clear the confusion among users.

For example, Google serves personalized ads to users, and part of what it uses to personalize ads is location data. It is possible to turn off ad personalization by turning off a setting, but the complaint argues that this does not stop Google from serving you ads based on your location, it just means that Google will assume you are within a 3km radius rather than using your exact GPS location on a map.

What's more, turning off this setting apparently won't change Google's other ad service, DoubleClick, which is used to show ads on other websites. Removing location information from those ads would require a different user interface, and Google will still use general location information to target users.

The complaint states that DoubleClick's settings cannot modify Google's ad personalization features:

"Even if a user thinks they have opted out of receiving location-based ads, Google has still done two things wrong: first, Google still uses settings to serve location-based ads (based on the user's approximate location); second, these practices are deceptive and unfair, and Google makes it impossible for users to truly opt out of having their location information collected."