From a response they sent to the press: Any location data that is sent back to Google location servers is anonymized and is not tied or traceable to a specific

From a response they sent to the press: Any location data that is sent back to Google location servers is anonymized and is not tied or traceable to a specific user. It's anonymized. They technically aren't tracking your location but finding out where a 'place' is through the triangulation data of that area, which is sent to their servers so next time someone in that location queries their database - via an app for example - gets more accurate feedback.