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It's funny, though, how every single "conspiracy" just randomly ends up falling in the "fine if you give them full access, fails if you turn off location services" quadrant. Like, I've not once seen a mistake in the direction of "eh just turn off that data collection point and it'll fix it."

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Imagine you have ~billions of users and 99.9% of them use the default. Do you put your eng effort towards power-user flexibility for the tinfoil hat crowd or do you improve popular features?

In the case mentioned, searching "your locations" appears to be just all on or all off (I have no insider knowledge of Maps). That greatly reduces the surface area for heisenbugs in a high QPS system.

The reason for that is pretty obvious isn't it? Very few systems depend on an absence of data to work. However, many systems can be designed which depend on the presence of data. If a setting affects the presence of data in some Google-internal databases, turning that setting off will disable any features that depend on the presence of that data in that database.

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