A ton of you keep location tracking enabled

Location tracking is a double-edged sword on Android phones, as the functionality is key to features like navigation, delivery services, and several other types of apps. On the other hand, this functionality is often used for marketing, data harvesting, and other reasons.

We wanted to know whether you keep location tracking enabled or disabled on your smartphone. So we posted a poll on Tuesday (February 15) and here’s how you answered it.

Do you keep location tracking enabled?

Results

The poll drew over 1,400 votes, and it turns out that two-thirds of respondents keep location tracking enabled on their phones. We don’t blame people for taking this route, as there are plenty of apps and services that require your location in the first place, so we could see how toggling the setting as needed could be annoying.

Speaking of which, 20% of polled readers say they turn it on when needed. Presumably, the privacy aspect outweighs the inconvenience of toggling it on and off.

Finally, almost 13% of respondents say they keep location tracking off. Of course, Google is facing a lawsuit for continuing to track users when they had location tracking disabled. So who knows if it’s fully disabled at his point.

Comments

• Vimuth Hasaranga: You cant turn off location tracking on any mainstream Android with google services or any apple smartphone unless you remove the battery or in somecases if you turned off the phone. The toggle only let you block location access to the user apps. On Android, google know where are you and on apple, they know where are you everytime. So this is kinda misconception. And note there are many ways other than GPS to pin point your location such as Wifi scanning(They can pinpoint your location using three nearby known wifi networks even when wifi is off.)and Device to device offline mesh networks. So in reality you cant turn off location tracking.
• Konrad Uroda-Darłak: Enabled all the time – I don’t have a time to turn it on and off across a day.
• JB Shield: Since I always know where I am it is disabled. Plus I have not done updates since 2019 so I didn’t get the contact tracing update either. I have a separate GPS unit anyway. Then again I pretty much always used it (K20V) only as a phone except sometimes for traffic and weather and those are just web apps.