Your Thoughts Are Now Geotagged. Welcome to 2040.

Welcome to 2040. It arrived twenty-two years early, it is in your pocket, and it knows exactly where you had lunch.

In August 2018, an Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android and iPhone store location data even when users have paused the "Location History" privacy setting. The Hacker News, reporting the investigation, noted that Princeton researchers confirmed the findings — the AP had mapped the movements of Princeton postdoctoral researcher Gunes Acar, carrying an Android phone with Location History switched off, and still recovered his train commutes to New York and visits to the High Line, Chelsea Market, Hell's Kitchen, Central Park, and Harlem. Searches with nothing to do with location — "chocolate chip cookies," "kids science kits" — pinpointed precise latitude and longitude, accurate to the square foot, and saved it to his Google account.

Google's response was a masterclass in the genre. Three days after the AP report, the company revised its help page to clarify that turning off Location History does not stop all location tracking. It did not change the tracking practice itself. The page previously stated: "With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored." The new version acknowledged that "some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other services, like Search and Maps." The contradiction was resolved, in other words, by editing the promise instead of the product.

This is the part where 2040 stops being a joke. The dystopia was never going to announce itself with a robot uprising. It was going to arrive as a settings menu with two toggles, one of which does less than it says, and a help page that gets quietly rewritten when someone notices. Your thoughts are not geotagged yet, technically. But your searches are, your photos are, your weather updates are, and your commute is — all with Location History off, all while the company insists its controls are robust.

The future is not watching you. It is just keeping very good records of everywhere you have ever been, in case it needs them later. Welcome to 2040. Please disable Location History. It will not help, but it will feel like you did something.

The underlying reporting is filed in the Evidence Locker: The Hacker News, reporting the AP investigation (Aug 13, 2018); 5G Technology World / AP (Aug 17, 2018).