Google is able to keep tracking the location of an Android user no matter if the individual has deleted Google Maps from the device he or she is using or not.
Security researcher Mustafa Al-Bassam discovered this by accident, when he walked into a McDonalds and suddenly found that a notification on his smartphone asking if he wanted to installed the fast food company's app.
After checking why this had happened, Bassam, who lives in the UK, wrote that apparently with the latest version of Android, Google Maps was turned on all the time, and would send a user notifications with no way to turn them off.
He further found that even if Google Maps was uninstalled, Google would keep tracking a user round the clock through the Google Play background service.
{loadposition sam08}"Google Play provides a location API for other apps," he wrote. "Kind of defeats the purpose of fine-grained privacy controls."
Bassam added that Google was encouraging developers to use the Google Play API rather than the native API, making an open operating system dependent on proprietary software.
Even if you uninstall Google Maps, Google Play's background service is tracking your location 24/7. pic.twitter.com/j8lPJtnyu9
— Mustafa Al-Bassam (@musalbas) 12 September 2016