Waze distinguishes itself as a navigation app by transforming the often boring task of commuting into an interactive, community-focused experience. In addition to using the app to find the fastest routes, you can warn other drivers (and receive warnings) of upcoming problems on your route, like a rogue car part in your lane and even where sneaky police are hiding with a radar gun.
For around 140 million drivers each month, this application has become an essential co-pilot. Users love what Waze offers so much that they rarely question the permissions they grant it when installing it. In fact, it seems like a simple swap: you get a faster ride and the app knows where you’re going each day. However, this trade-off is more lopsided than it seems.
All this crowdsourcing magic doesn’t happen by chance. To work, it relies on a constant stream of location data. And just like its sibling Google Maps, Waze can keep tabs on your exact coordinates long after you’ve parked your car and closed the app (although there are plenty of differences between Google Maps and Waze).
Depending on your smartphone settings, Waze has the ability to run silently in the background, recording your location and route history even when you’re not in your car. If you blindly clicked “Allow” when first setting up this app, you may have handed over the keys to your daily movements without realizing how much information you’re giving away.
Exactly what types of data does the Waze app collect?
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When you look under the hood of Waze’s privacy policy, the volume of data collected is staggering. The app doesn’t just look at your current GPS coordinates: it collects your usual routes, your driving speed, how often you travel, your home and work addresses, and much more. It also collects metadata about your device type, battery level, and third-party apps or sites you use through the app.
If your phone’s location permissions for Waze are set to “Always” rather than just “When using the app,” this data collection can become a 24/7 operation. Waze can use background location data to learn your habits, which it claims to do to give you benefits like better predictive routing (for example, alerting you that there’s heavy traffic on your usual route to the office before you go out).
While this sounds rather convenient, it means that Alphabet (Google’s parent company, which also owns Waze, although Google Maps has more features) is building a deeply intimate map of your daily life. Every stop at a coffee shop, doctor’s office or friend’s house can be recorded, stored and linked to your device profile. This, in turn, reinforces the massive data profile the tech giant already maintains on you.
How Privacy Settings Give a False Sense of Security
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Naturally, Waze offers a range of privacy settings that claim to put you in control. You can dive into the app’s settings and enable “Invisible” mode, which makes your cute little car avatar disappear from the public map. You can also go to Ads Settings to opt out of personalized ads based on your location.
But here’s the thing every privacy-conscious user needs to understand: These settings only limit how your data is shared with other users or used by third-party advertisers. To truly and properly use Waze, the underlying data collection never stops.
Ultimately, Waze works on a basic trade-off: you get accurate traffic data and in return, you act as a constant data node for Google’s infrastructure. If you want to limit this background tracking, your best bet is to go to your iOS or Android system settings and restrict Waze’s location access to “Only when using the app.” (In fact, these Android features display any privacy permissions you’ve granted.) But if you’re fundamentally opposed to the continued collection and recording of your contact information, you might consider abandoning the app altogether.
