If you have location services on, your gmail account has a map of everywhere you have been with your phone. It’s very very creepy.
That's not my understanding. Google servers may have it - but my gmail account does not. I am a longterm gmail user. I know that android users find their location data in gmail, but I don't. Mine is online on icloud.
If a person uses maps.google, then google has a record of where they have been. But if you do not use maps. google and instead use, say, apple's mapping system, your location does NOT show up on google.
Gmail has no clue what my phone number is. How would it track me?
If if you have a link to explain it - I'd like to see it. But I've worked in forensics (and more on the digital side for the past 10 years) and I do not believe gmail (I have about 10 gmail accounts) knows where I am - on any of my accounts.
But icloud does.
IMO. And I could turn off location services (which is part of my phone's OS - and that is IOS, not android) if I did not want to be tracked, but I do.
But nope, no way to find out where I've been on gmail or my larger google account. Do you know which of the menu choices I'd have to pick to get this? Because none of the ones I have provide this information. Maybe I'm missing something. In the podcaxt, To Live and Die in L.A., it's clear that LE had to go to Google with a subpoena to get google map data. You're saying that data is also on my own account - but I don't see it. I don't even understand how it would be possible, since gmail doesn't know my phone number nor is my location data sent to gmail.
IOW, what option would I have to enable to get this service?
TIA.
ETA: I did go check maps.google within gmail - it can't even find my phone right now, and I'm sitting next to it, much less provide any information on where that phone has been. What other way would an app have of tracking where I am? What it
does show are places I've input into Google maps, in order to get directions (but since I rarely have to go anywhere that I don't know how to get to - my "recent" places are...just my workplace). It doesn't show my route, it doesn't show the several errands I just ran, etc.
Oh, and it also shows a BUNCH of places I've never been (including places I've saved due to true crime interest - but also Tintangel and Stonehenge are in my saved places - because I WANT to go there...that's what google maps is saving to the google interface. I think it's a disservice to Google itself to claim that it snoops on our phones (when it doesn't even know my phone number! I use a different recovery method - and have never been prompted to do otherwise, nor would I).
I don't like people to be any more paranoid about being tracked than they already are, personally. Nor do I want someone relying on maps.google or "gmail" as a security feature that can later tell family members where a person has been. Surely a device would have to be attached to said person - and if we don't tell Google what device to track (which it can't track anyway, as it is not my phone carrier NOR my Apple account).
Do Android users get the same features that I get from Apple? I suspect so - and I bet there's a way of disabling that, just as there is on iPhone.