For years most people thought that if you disabled Location History in your Google settings that meant the company would stop tracking your movements. Turns out that’s not totally true.

An investigation by the Associated Press has found that Google tracks and stores your location data even if you’ve instructed it to pause your Location History. From the AP’s report:

“Google says that [pausing your Location History] will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”
That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.

“For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches that have nothing to do with location, like ‘chocolate chip cookies,’ or ‘kids science kits,’ pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude — accurate to the square foot — and save it to your Google account.

To be sure, this is very unnerving. As for Google, the company says it has been upfront that it still stores some of your location data even when you tell it not to. But as Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement bureau, points out:

"If you’re going to allow users to turn off something called ‘Location History,’ then all the places where you maintain location history should be turned off. That seems like a pretty straightforward position to have.”

So is there any way you can get Google to stop tracking you? Thankfully, yes–but you’ll need to take multiple steps.

Pause Location History

This is the first step you should take. To pause your location history, go to https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/activitycontrols and under the Location History card, toggle the switch to off. Once you do this, Google will stop recording your location to your timeline.

However, as the AP report shows–doing only this won’t stop Google from tracking your location.

Pause Web & App Activity

What you really need to do to stop Google from using its tricks to track your location is to pause Web & App Activity. Doing this will depersonalize your map and search results (for example, in maps you won’t see saved locations)–but you reclaim your privacy.

To pause your Web & App Activity, go to https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/activitycontrols and under the Web & App Activity card, toggle the switch to off.

Ditch Android

Yep, even if you take the steps above, you’re still not totally free of Google’s snooping if you’re an Android user. As the AP researchers found out, Google will spy on your location–and timestamp your Google account with your location detail, if you use Google’s default weather services on Android.

This is shady as all get out–and speaking of get out, you should get out of the Android ecosystem if google doesn’t change this.