I dislike Google's data slurping practices, and moved away from Gmail and other of their services years ago due to mistrust, but I think that was just an honest documentation bug. The button was to disable only the Location History feature, but the description made it sound like it was a global setting for the whole device. As a developer, I could very well see myself making that mistake; being embedded in the context, it's easy to miss how it will be read by someone else.