>Do people really think Google isn't tracking location data without this setting enabled? How would anyone (save for a whistleblower) know? [...]
You can't, in the same way you wouldn't know whether Carl Sagan really has an invisible dragon in his garage or not. It's impossible to prove a negative.
>It doesn't matter if you delete the list of GPS coordinates from your google account because what you can't delete is the "This user is gay and often goes to gay bars on Saturdays" flag that google put there the instant they got that data.
Is there any evidence this actually happens? The bike thief example you linked is more straightforwardly explained with police using a geofence warrant, rather than some ML system that recorded "this guy bikes at 4pm to 6pm".
Sounds like a good reason not to trust them. That said, it's not impossible to be reasonably assured that our data isn't being stored or used inappropriately, but that would require strong regulations which protected that data and a proven record of companies being caught and facing meaningful consequences for violating those regulations. It'd be nice if we had strong whistleblower protections as well. Maybe a massive bounty to anyone who can prove to regulators that their company is violating customer's privacy would help.
> Is there any evidence this actually happens?
Well, yeah. That's literally Google's entire business model. They collect as much data as they can about you, so that advertisers can request their ads to be show to certain segments of the population. That's what targeted advertising is. Nobody is sending Google updates on their lives, google just makes a bunch of guesses and inferences using the massive amounts of data they collect about you, and as long as they are correct most of the time it pays off for advertisers.
Among the worst are lists of people with mental illness, dementia, poor education/literacy, low intelligence, etc. I doubt Google lets you target people based on predatory lists like that, but they might keep them for their own uses. They have collected the test scores and grades of a lot of children through schools that force students to create google accounts and use chromebooks. It'd be pretty easy for them to sort people into buckets like "smart" or "dumb".
Lots of companies privacy polices state specifically that they collect this kind of data. For example, here a company that collects "Personal Information used to create a profile about you, which may include your preferences, reading or writing levels, abilities, aptitudes, and other data or analytics provided about you or your account by our third-party partners or data aggregators. " (https://www.captivoice.com/capti-site/public/entry/privacy_p...)
I can't promise that this happens in the EU, but it does in the US. Literally any child using a chromebook for school, as many are forced to by the schools, is forced to hand massive amounts of personal data to Google. Google may claim that they aren't keeping the data they are collecting, but they are collecting it and their services wouldn't function if they were not. This leads to some weird situations where a student who violates youtube's ToS can be locked out of the chromebook their school requires them to use to take tests and do homework (see https://old.reddit.com/r/k12sysadmin/comments/109cn00/suspen...)
You can't, in the same way you wouldn't know whether Carl Sagan really has an invisible dragon in his garage or not. It's impossible to prove a negative.
>It doesn't matter if you delete the list of GPS coordinates from your google account because what you can't delete is the "This user is gay and often goes to gay bars on Saturdays" flag that google put there the instant they got that data.
Is there any evidence this actually happens? The bike thief example you linked is more straightforwardly explained with police using a geofence warrant, rather than some ML system that recorded "this guy bikes at 4pm to 6pm".