Google continues to work to improve the control we can exercise over our privacy. We have been able to activate the incognito mode in many browsers for a long time to avoid registering the websites we have visited in the history. Now this incognito mode has landed in the Google Maps app for iPhone and in this article we explain how you can easily activate it.
Do not leave a trace of your searches in Google Maps on iPhone
The incognito mode came to Google Maps on Android in early 2019, but on iPhone we had to wait almost a year to activate it. But finally Google has announced in a note on its blog that iPhone users can already use this function after updating the application to version 5.32. The update note of this version already anticipates the inclusion of this mode as follows:
We have added a new way to control your privacy in Google Maps. Now you can use incognito mode when you don’t want your activity saved, such as the sites you are looking for or where you are going, in your Google account.
Once we have updated the application to the latest version available on our iPhone, we simply follow the following steps to activate the incognito mode:
- Enter Google Maps from your iPhone.
- In the upper right corner click on your user photo.
- Click on the option that says ‘Activate incognito mode’.
Normally when we perform a search through Google Maps, the places we consult enter a location history. This history can be useful to create a timeline of the sites we have visited and also to obtain recommendations of locations that we might like.
But if you don’t want this information to be stored you simply have to activate this incognito mode. What we get when activating it is to avoid saving the search or browsing history in the account and neither the location history nor the shared location is updated. Obviously, by ‘prohibiting’ the application from collecting this information, the Maps customization function is completely inactive.
Without a doubt this is a function that we appreciate that it has been implemented in the end on iPhone when it had been active for many months on Android devices. It is important that we can control the processing of search information to prevent it from being stored in our history but we want to leave a trace of the searches we perform.
We can use it to prevent anyone from knowing where we have gone if they take our mobile phone as we do with the incognito mode of our browsers.
Gradually Google is working on implementing interesting privacy options in its application. Specifically, they are already working on a new option to massively eliminate the timeline that uses location history to remind us where we have been on a particular day. In the end this application can store all our routes and this is very valuable information that we hope will allow to eliminate in a massive way soon.
Leave us in the comment box what you think in this incognito way, will you activate it often?