And here I am creeped the fuck out by Google (as always) suggesting me to take photos of the bakery I'm at while having location and WiFi turned off :)

Felt like tagging you in this one
@linuxxx

GPS ?

Maybe with the phone signal?

Welcome to the capabilities of a mass surveillance engine called Google :)

@FilipeRamalho all off

@nobes probably , but should not, right?

@azous I don't know if this works.

@Condor was on 4g only but that makes sense, anyway it is creepy as fuck

I don't remember where but I read Android doesn't turn off completely the GPS signal and shares that information with Google regardless of your settings. (Google services)

@Condor my location was turned off 😜

@Condor yeah, gonna go back to using one but I think it is as @JKyll said, they actually don't turn it off at all when you switch it off

Google doesn't give a fuck about user settings. Even if you shut down data, location your phone still collects your location data and stores them. They say stuff like 'you're walking now", "you've met X for Y mins at Z place" , "you're now passing through a door" are also recorded with the help of the great AI The first thing when the device connects to the internet is to send them packets to Google.
I don't have the link to the video demonstrating this though.
In this sense technically VPN is still useless.

@sudo-rm-rf nop, i turn everything off to prevent battery draining and I even turn off background network for the majority off apps I have

Not only the gps, they listen voice too. They suggested me a song I was talking about few days back when I entered only first letter of that song.

Android system tracks pretty much everything, when when you're not connected to data or GPS

There was an research done, everything turned off and on with two different devices

Still both of them tracked and uploaded pretty much the same stuff

@DarKneT there was a video demonstrating the same. Don't have the link.

@DarKneT Google play services* I run a phone without Google play services myself :)

Probably this is what they used: https://developers.google.com/maps/...

I actually used it once myself on a project, where we used sim cards in devices to track their current location. Works quite well.