Google asks me daily for my location to improve connectivity even if I say no

If you treated another person this way, it would be considered abuse.

Of course it does. Google is a personal information farming company, who uses that information to help sell targeted advertisements. They are not an email company, or a maps company, or a search engine, or a phone OS maker. The sooner more people recognize this, and the ramifications of it, the better off we'll all be.

You can't say no. Google thinks that's rude.

Stop carrying a phone. Get rid of it, throw it in the trash and never look back.

All phones are surveillance devices.

Same with cookies settings, on many websites. I decline/refuse every time, while logged in, but they continue to ask every time, probably until I misclick. Some browser extensions help a bit to manage this, but the burden is still here.

There should be a law to enforce giving and accepting 'no' as an answer. I'm seeing "not now" everywhere nowadays, and it started to make my blool boil.

I can and I am already using all sorts of blockers at different level that even if I said yes at some point the data isn't going anywhere, but enough is enough, it shouldn't be an arms race to protect very basic privacy or simply having dignity in front of my computer or cellphone.

It's ubiquitous, although malevolent behavior.

I get a fucking SMS from Vodafone every day reminding me to complete some fucking survey. I even sent STOP back to the automated phone number they use, as it's specified if I don't wanna receive such messages anymore and I still receive them.

At least with Google you're using it for free. I'm f*ink paying for that Vodafone service and they still consider appropriate to spam me incessantly.

I could report the fuckers to https://anpc.ro/ but it's too much trouble on my side following up and they probably know it.

Where does it ask this? In the browser? Then you can prevent it by 'Always deny'.

On an unrelated usability issue:

They have recently updated their login page. Now instead of a single TAB to get from the user name field to the password field you need something like five key presses to get to the enter password page.

Yes, I should not use that surveillance company in the first place. Or in their opinion never log out, not use cookie auto delete, Firefox account containers etc.

Unfortunately I try to balance between the two standpoints.

That's what we get for using an ad blocker and not paying for Youtube. I guess it's only fair.

I have a similar thing with the google photos app. Almost every day it asks "You photos are not backed up, enable it now". I say no (obviously). Then it asks "But maybe you should backup these 100 images?" Pretty please?! Clearly 100 images is enough to build a good profile.

I used uBlock's element picker to remove the modal and then added a custom rule to re-enable the scrollbar.

Why this behavior is legal is beyond me. They do the same thing with Play Protect which I don't want to enable no matter how many times they ask.

Degoogle Yoself

Another one, the play store says I must continue setting up my account every time I use it. It does this to ask for my payment details, but I can skip it, so it's not required. Yet it will ask again next time.

Disable GPS, and just enable it when you use it. That's how i solved it, google probably don't want that data since it's just "hotspot" accuracy (maybe you want to disable wifi too)

Just to use Google Authentication (eg. to log into ebay) they want my kid to allow tracking (which is disabled on ios).

IP Address not good enough for them it seems

> How can I stop it

You can't.

Not wanting to excuse Google here (or in any way alleging that they aren't a greedy adtech/surveillance capitalism outlet that is stripmining the world for data) but are we sure this particular situation isn't a software bug?

I also have an android phone, and I never so far got persistent nag screens asking for my location. One screen on a new install, sure. Also lots of passive-agressive behaviour when you disable location. But no daily asks.

So I'd more chall this up to a bug or a third-party app abusing the permission system. I think more information would be needed when exactly the notification are happening, from which app they are coming and when they started.

If you use Android, an interesting way Google may be collecting your location data - even if you didn't accept any TOS - is SUPL (Secure User Plane Location). It sends cell tower info to a Google server to improve GPS fix times, but many implementations needlesly include PII like the SIM card IMSI number. It can be disabled in settings>location, but it's enabled by default even in GrapheneOS. In my experience it doesn't affect the GPS fix times significantly.

Hard to answer. I had the problem too and can't remember exactly how I stopped it (some setting somewhere, I did never once accept it).

But that may depend on where you live, European data privacy law might make things look a lot different here than elsewhere in the world.

I call this dark pattern “nag forever” It is a great sign that you should immediately and permanently stop doing business with a company.

Don't use google?

I was able to solve it by disabling notifications... Really annoying though.

Google asks me every time I need to open their cursed SMS app if I wanted to enable RCS (as if anyone cared about it)

One of the top idiotic designs by google for sure.

I would probably enable it if I believed their SMS app wouldn't become even slower and bugged than it is, still their decision to ask every time makes me not trust them with that decision