In fact if there's any relation wouldn't it be the reverse? If you're using the location data unethically, you wouldn't want to draw attention to the fact that it's being gathered.
So I don't see this as about whether the provider has "good" or "bad" intentions; I see this as about whether the provider asks me for permission/consent before using my data. It's certainly theoretically possible that a provider is good at talking the talk and also being actively malicious, by asking for permission and then ignoring it or something, but that's not the problem I have or the article's author has with Google.
Google does explicitly ask you for permission to do this. And whenever someone in this thread points that out, someone replies with some variation of "yeah, but they probably do it anyway". Well...OK then I guess. There's not much of a conversation that can happen after that, but you do you.
My location history is blank, and set not to gather more data, but I still got those notifications, until I turned them off earlier today. I suspect that one of the times I turned on location, that it asked to also "activate Google Location Services to improve accuracy", or something.
> someone replies with some variation of "yeah, but they probably do it anyway".
My variation is "I've checked the 3 places I know to look, and I'll have to watch the New Features lists of future OS releases to find all of the things I'd like to opt out of."