All this location awareness sounds brutal on the battery. I put in a lot of time and effort in Tasker to specifically avoid using GPS. There better be a way to turn all this nonsense off.
Just going through the various settings:
1. You can always go to Settings -> Location Services and turn off GPS Satellites. Then all it will do is find your rough location using nearby wifi networks and cell towers. Of course if you also have wifi off then it will only use towers. This will still give it a good enough idea of where you are that it can tell what's nearby (restaurants, movie theaters, weather conditions, etc).
2. Latitude is an opt-in service. In my case at least, it was off by default and I had to specifically grant it permission to turn on. You can also decide whether location data is collected at all, and if it is, whether it can be shared with Google or not.
3. Google Now can be fully disabled if you want. When you launch it, you can press the menu button in the lower right and enable/disable specific features (weather, sports, traffic, nearby places, public transportation, and so on) or globally disable the whole thing with an on/off switch in the upper right corner.
I had GPS satellites on by default, but since I rarely use navigation, I'm going to try turning it off and seeing if my battery life is improved a bit. Far as I can tell, there isn't much benefit to having GPS on unless you're using it for navigation or if you're in an unfamiliar area. If you generally know where you are, it's not necessary.
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