How to disable geolocation on Android

Having Google’s geolocation services always activated offers interesting advantages, a large part of their success (and what, in part, makes it so difficult to detach from them) is nothing more than that location in real time. Thanks to it, we are offered recommendations for shops, cafes or restaurants, the fastest routes to get from home to work (and vice versa) and even the flow of traffic on the main roads of your city at certain times of the day. This comes at a price: our data, and there are plausible threats to our privacy, which means that many users decide to turn off geolocation. If you are in that group of users, keep reading because what we are going to tell you interests you.

So you can stop Google from following you

To deactivate geolocation on your Android terminal, you will have to go to the route Settings> Google> Manage your Google account> Data and personalization:

Data tab and personalization of Google settings

Within this tab, we will look at the section Controls your account activity. In here we will have to deactivate both the options Web and application activity, As the Location history:

Location activity disabled

To do this you will have to enter both sections and click on the slider that will appear on the screen. Deactivating this control is necessary, as this way we make sure that neither Google applications nor the websites that we visit using Chrome can access our geolocation data.

As a last recommendation, it is also interesting that you deactivate the location of the photos you

take with the phone’s camera. To do this, open the camera application and click on the menu button that you will find in the upper left corner of the screen. Once there, under the section general, make sure the option Save location is disabled, as you can see below:

Camera location disabled

Needless to say, if the option is not disabled, you will have to disable it yourself.

Once you have completed these simple steps, you will have made the Big G stop caring about your location.

How to stop applications from using your location

What we have just explained serves so that, in broad strokes, Google stops tracking us using its services. But, what happens when non-Google apps do not have access to the GPS of our terminal? The process, then, is a bit more cumbersome.

In order to manage these permissions, you will have to go to the route Settings> Applications and notifications and enter one that you know uses your GPS and then click on Permissions. Check that you are allowed access to your location:

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If so (as in this example), click on the permission and then on Deny:

Deny location access to an app

In this way, you make sure that no app that you may have installed accesses your location. What is the problem? You will have to do it one by one, there is no way to do this batch process.