Here's your answer: There's no such thing, at least at scale, as sharing your information without also storing it. Not if you want the system to be reliable. S

Here's your answer: There's no such thing, at least at scale, as sharing your information without also storing it. Not if you want the system to be reliable. So in order to make Google share your location with others, you have to give them permission to store your location. This should be self-evident enough if you take a moment to think about it. As for lumping web history together with location history, it turns out you can derive the latter if you know the former. There's been a lot of fuss and breathless reporting about that fact. So authorizing them to know the one without the other is a bit of a fiction, especially in those cases that get written up by tech journalists. Best not to pretend that it's possible to keep them separate. This new thing is an acknowledgement of the fact that the whole point of using Google services is sharing information with them and asking them to hold on to it, at least for a bit, at least until you've gotten the desired use out of the service... but also of the fact that a certain kind of person, the kind you often find on HN, would sleep better if Google deleted that data after it had served it's immediate purpose.