Google’s Sneaky Move to Eat your Privacy Away

Google has a history of being privacy invasive but the recent sneaky change takes it to a whole another level.

It changed maps.google.com to google.com/maps.

Okay, this might not look so threatening at the first glance, but the way that browsers work in that the permissions are domain based.

So basically, if you give your location permission to maps.google.com before this change, you would only allow google to access your location when you’re on google maps sub-domain and the google.com domain would still have no access to your location.

But with this new domain changes, you’re giving the google.com domain the location permission which basically means all the google services can access your location constantly even when you’re not on maps.

Let’s say you’re on google search and you’re like me and doesn’t want to share your location to google search as it already has your IP based location and you don’t want it to pin point you. Now you have to manually turn off the permission and re-enable it for maps.

I would say this might be a smart move suggested by some intern at google to get a raise, but I hate this personally.

Probably going to switch to using apple maps or just go back to good old days of asking people for the directions.

Thanks for reading this short article, I just wanted to share once I saw this redirect, hope you all guys stop using google maps and switch to bing maps, just like you did with search (or did you really ?).

See you in the next one ;)