Documents in Arizona's antitrust lawsuit against Google have been released unredacted; as discovered by Insider, the documents were not censored by the judge following pressure from Digital Content Next and the News Media Alliance.

Among other things, the documents reveal that Google encouraged third-party Android makers to obscure settings through "aggressive misrepresentation, concealment, and omission of facts" to make popular privacy settings harder to find.

The document states that when Google tested a version of Android that pushed privacy settings to the forefront, it found it "problematic" that too many users were using them. As a result, the settings were buried so deep that only a select few could find them.

But users were not the only ones confused by the maze-like privacy menu. Jen Chai, a senior product manager for location-based services, was unsure how the various privacy settings interacted with each other.

"Is there any way to give my location to a third-party app instead of Google?" one employee was quoted as saying. It's not the kind of thing that would make the front page of the New York Times."

Another employee is clearly uneasy about the company's data hanger: "Failure #2: Failure #2: *I* should be able to get *my* location information on *my* phone without having to share that information with Google," said that employee.

"This could be how Apple is eating our lunch," the employee added, saying it would be "much more likely" to allow users to opt out of data sharing with the company.

The extent of Google's knowledge of Android's user base was revealed by Jack Menzel, former vice president of Google Maps.

All of this is interesting background for the upcoming release of Android 12, which will introduce a new privacy dashboard and the ability to make your location tracking a bit more obscure for apps that request your location.

If the unedited statement is a fair reflection of the corporate culture, this option may be purely a counter to the user protections introduced in iOS 14.5 rather than a deep commitment to privacy.