Google location-tracking tactics troubled its own engineers

Google's own engineers were troubled by the way the company secretly tracked the movements of people who didn't want to be followed until a 2018 Associated Press investigation uncovered the shadowy surveillance, according to unsealed documents in a consumer fraud case.

The behind-the-scenes peek stems from a three-month-old lawsuit against Google filed by Arizona's attorney general. The files, unsealed late last week, reveal that Google knew it had a massive problem on its hands after an AP article published in August 2018 explained how the company continued to track users' whereabouts even after they had disabled the feature Google called “location history.”

The released documents include internal Google emails and a fresh version of the state's civil complaint with fewer redactions than the original.

The same day the AP story was published, the company held what one unidentified email correspondent called an “Oh S—-” meeting to discuss its location tracking tools, according to the unsealed records in Arizona’s Maricopa County Superior Court. Google also began monitoring public reaction to the AP story, including how it was trending across Facebook, Twitter and other influential online services, the documents show.

Some of Google's own engineers scolded the company for misleading people about how its location tracking settings worked. “I agree with the article," one engineer wrote in a particularly blunt assessment after the AP story was published. “Location off should mean location off, not except for this case or that case."

Another Google engineer wrote, “Indeed we aren’t very good at explaining this to users." Another concurred that what the company was doing was “definitely confusing from a user point of view."

The release of the emails is embarrassing for a company that tries to build...