In 2018, Google broke headlines for tracking its users location even after they disabled the sharing of location history via their privacy settings.
There were complaints against the company, stating, "Google represented that a user ‘can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.’ This simply was not true."
In the wake of receiving intense criticism over location history, Google came up with necessary adjustments which now allow users to stop the tech giant from tracking them, except for the applications in which location data is of utmost importance such as Waze and Google Maps.
In an attempt to make Google Maps even more secure and trustworthy, the company added enhanced security features related to location privacy in Android 10; to further better the services and regain the lost user trust, Google is planning to add Incognito Mode to Google Maps and the feature is said to be in testing.
Users can always put restrictions on the location data collected by Google Maps by signing out of their Google account, but it will come at the cost of their convenience, therefore, Google is planning to introduce Incognito Mode which can be turned on by the users in the same way they do it for Youtube or Google Chrome to delink the search or navigation data from their main Google account.
In order to activate Incognito Mode, users can simply choose the option from their Google account avatar and they will be informed about the app being in incognito mode by a black status bar and the marker indicating the location will turn into dark from blue to mark the change.
To enable the feature, users are recommended to install Preview Maps version 10.26 or higher and for those who are not a part of Preview Maps test group, wait until the company releases it on a wider scale.
