Fuckaholics finding it difficult to say "You can't stop us from tracking your fucking ass".

Right??

Technically they are correct, if they’re going by public IP address of your request: but all they have to do is not look that up. It’s way more work to say “QUICK LOCATION TRACKING IS OFF, CHECK THEIR IP AGAINST THE WHOIS DATABASE IMMEDIATELY!” than to just NOT track by IP.

That's why Google thinks that I'm in the Philippines and every other sensible service thinks that I'm in Italy (which is where my traffic almost always exits my network). Meanwhile physically I'm in neither.

But yes, while it's possible to let your traffic flow out from different locations with various methods, the IP stack has never been designed to be anonymous. So they are correct that your network location can never be removed entirely. But it's easy to get around.

I think this honestly evolved out of people searching what they shouldn't and they need to report it to the ISP and police

@dudeking @Condor Google uses visible wifi networks and their signal strengths to triangulate your location -- even while in airplane mode. It prefers this to public ip for location as your ip can be proxied easily, and isn't always available. (It uses ip for locale/language and some other services, oddly.)

This is why Google asks, after I get home and connect to wifi, if I had visited to a restaurant/store I walked near despite having GPS disabled and being in airplane mode the entire trip.

It's creepy and I haven't found a way to stop it.

Yes, I can turn off all of these settings, and have, but that only turns off the suggestions I receive, not the data my phone sends.

@Root why not run a custom ROM with the nano OpenGApps (or none at all if you don't need the Play Store)? That should take care of it. Also be sure that WiFi scanning is turned off.

@Condor Because Samsung.

I'd love to use a custom OS, but apparently Knox, etc. makes that a gigantic pain, and sometimes the attempt bricks the phone. 😕

I already have wifi scanning, location history, etc. turned off, but that doesn't stop Android itself from doing them.

@Root welp, yeah Knox has gotta be the nastiest move that Samsung has made lately... "Security feature" my ass. Not buying anything from Samsung anymore because of that. SafetyNet already does everything Knox was meant to do.. ridiculous how they're getting away with it.