The 3 Google app permissions nobody turns off, but probably should

Published Sep 7, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Arol is a tech journalist who currently works as a contributor at How-To Geek since 2022. He first began writing online for the short-lived portal of Spanish-language gaming forum Emudesc in 2013. Years later, in 2017, he got his true start in tech journalism working for a small Google-focused site called Pixel Spot. He transitioned to a news and feature writer role at XDA Developers that same year, where he worked until 2021 before making the jump to other websites. Arol brings nearly a decade of writing experience, and the occasional hot take, to his writings. While he's a technology lover at heart, he holds computer hardware and smartphones particularly close to heart. You'll normally find him covering news, although he has also written the occasional deal, buyer's guide, how-to post, and round-up. He's also written for Android Police and MakeUseOf. He's also a Political Science student. When he's not writing, you'll probably find him hitting the gym, trying to ace a new hobby, reading his textbooks, or traveling. You can reach him at me@arolwright.com. Third-party apps get most of the scrutiny when it comes to permission creep, but Google's own apps are often the bigger offenders. Here's a look at three permissions Google's ecosystem quietly holds onto well past the point they're needed. Precise/background location Google's own apps rarely dial this back Credit: Adam Davidson / How-To Geek Android's location model gives users a clear choice between precise and approximate accuracy, plus a separate choice between foreground-only and always-on access, yet Google's own apps are some of the most persistent about asking for the highest tier of both. The Google app, which handles Search, Assistant, and Lens, is explicit about this in its own support documentation: precise location helps sharpen results for queries like nearby coffee shops or bus stops, but that same access is also used to deliver locally relevant Assistant notifications even when the app isn't open, meaning the always-on grant serves convenience features well beyond the search box people actually interact with. Google Maps has an obvious, defensible case for background location during active navigation, but its location footprint extends further than turn-by-turn directions. It also powers Timeline, traffic contribution, and location history, features that many users never open but that keep pulling from the same always-allow permission Maps was granted for driving directions. Google Photos is a bit of a subtler case: it uses location primarily to geotag and organize a camera roll, which typically only requires reading data already embedded in a photo's metadata, yet many installs still carry broader location access left over from setup. None of this is malicious, but it illustrates a pattern: Google's apps ask for precise, always-on access to support a wide bundle of features, and because they're pre-installed, system-level apps, most people never revisit that grant the way they might scrutinize a random flashlight app. Physical activity/body sensors Fitness apps aren't the only ones asking It's easy to assume physical activity and body sensor permissions belong exclusively to fitness apps, and Google Fit, along with its eventual successor Google Health, is the obvious example of legitimate use: it needs activity recognition and body sensor access to log steps, workouts, and heart rate from a connected watch. That's a reasonable trade for a purpose-built health app. What's less obvious is that Google's non-fitness apps ask for the same access. The Google app itself requests physical activity recognition, a permission tied to features like automatically detecting driving or commuting so your phone can surface relevant context, such as traffic conditions or hands-free suggestions, without a person needing to open the app first. Google Maps taps into similar activity-detection signals to infer transportation mode for more accurate directions and Timeline entries, distinguishing a walk from a transit ride from a drive. In both cases, the permission isn't powering the app's headline feature so much as a secondary layer of automation running in the background. The practical issue is less about any single grant and more about accumulation: once several Google apps each hold activity or body sensor access for their own tangential features, a fairly detailed picture of movement and routine can be reconstructed across them, even though no individual app was built around that data. Nearby devices Casting features leave scanning switched on indefinitely Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek Nearby devices access is easy to justify in the moment: casting a video from YouTube to a TV, sending a photo slideshow from Google Photos to a smart display, or throwing a browser tab from Chrome onto a Chromecast all require scanning for and connecting to devices over Bluetooth or the local Wi-Fi network. Google has built casting into a wide swath of its own apps, and each of them requests this permission independently the first time a person taps the cast icon. The catch is that the permission, once granted, doesn't expire after the cast session ends. YouTube, Google Photos, Chrome, and Google Home can all continue scanning for nearby devices indefinitely, long after someone has cast a single video to a living room TV and never touched the feature again. Because the permission is framed around a specific, understandable action, in the moment, it feels harmless to approve, but few people return afterward to ask whether an app that's cast something once still needs standing access to detect every Bluetooth and Wi-Fi device in range. This matters more for Google's apps specifically because so many of them share this casting infrastructure, which means the same nearby devices that grant tend to multiply across a person's installed Google apps rather than staying contained to one. Revisiting the permission manager and limiting nearby devices' access to whichever app is actually used for casting on a regular basis, while revoking it from the rest, rarely affects day-to-day use, since the permission prompt reappears the next time a cast icon is tapped from an app that no longer has standing access. Google's apps deserve the same scrutiny as anyone else's The apps people trust most by default are often the ones holding onto the broadest permissions the longest. A quick pass through Google's own apps in the permission manager is worth the five minutes it takes.