All information, and people are giving it to them for free. There is billions in dollar of profit from selling peoples data and the user gets nothing of that.
I still remember filling out my Facebook profile back when it was very new (after it was open to everyone but before it even had the timeline) and I'm just flabbergasted at how much information I was willing to fork over as a naïve child presented with a grid of form fields to fill out. crazy to see how it's only got more ridiculous over time. now Snapchat (which I'm about to convince my fiancée to uninstall so neither of us uses it anymore) is giving me notifications telling me about friends and family that I should add as friends, despite me never giving the app access to my contacts! I wish I could go back in time and convince my younger self about how bad things were going to get and why I should minimize my online footprint as much as possible. well, cat's out of the bag now...
I remember being a teen when Google Health rolled out (checking online now they gave up on it in 2012, no surprise) and writing down the entirety of my medical history in it.
For me at least, Google sends me monthly (quarterly?) updates on my location history and prompts me to review it. I assume people get this by default, and so anyone checking their google account email would see these emails and open them to see literally every single destination of theirs is permanently saved. They don't exactly hide it.
Not defending Google, they suck. But in this one instance I don't think it's that much of a dirty secret or anything. Just an open dirty behavior.
Anecdotally, I don't get those emails myself, but I do see the point you're making. My follow up question would be, what other data are they gathering from you at the same time that they're not prompting you to review?
To be fair, the user is getting a pretty amazing map/gps program.
It it worth it? Are they completely upfront about the data they’re harvesting?
You can opt out. Stand alone gps is still available. Open Street maps is an amazing open source program too.
My car has a 2010 gps. It works. It’s not great but it’s gets you close. In some ways I miss my old Tom Tom. It had the mr. T voice yelling at me where to go.
