iPhone gives you lots of controls around location history, and certainly there is nothing in the iPhone ecosystem where they want you to contribute reviews or human analysis to help them with gathering data. I trust that these controls work. My cell phone provider knows where I am to route calls, but I trust that they aren't also keeping the data for fun / marketing / etc.
The suggestion that it couldn't happen on other devices is certainly at odds with technical capabilities; the suggestion that it isn't happening is a different one entirely, and is not crazy.
In fact if there's any relation wouldn't it be the reverse? If you're using the location data unethically, you wouldn't want to draw attention to the fact that it's being gathered.
So I don't see this as about whether the provider has "good" or "bad" intentions; I see this as about whether the provider asks me for permission/consent before using my data. It's certainly theoretically possible that a provider is good at talking the talk and also being actively malicious, by asking for permission and then ignoring it or something, but that's not the problem I have or the article's author has with Google.
Google does explicitly ask you for permission to do this. And whenever someone in this thread points that out, someone replies with some variation of "yeah, but they probably do it anyway". Well...OK then I guess. There's not much of a conversation that can happen after that, but you do you.
My location history is blank, and set not to gather more data, but I still got those notifications, until I turned them off earlier today. I suspect that one of the times I turned on location, that it asked to also "activate Google Location Services to improve accuracy", or something.
> someone replies with some variation of "yeah, but they probably do it anyway".
My variation is "I've checked the 3 places I know to look, and I'll have to watch the New Features lists of future OS releases to find all of the things I'd like to opt out of."
That's like saying a transistor radio needs to know where broadcast antennas are, which is obviously absurd.
If it does not do this, it is not a cellular phone. There are other types of portable phones that don't work this way, like cordless landline phones (the base doesn't know where it is, just that it's plugged into a phone jack) or satellite phones. But the "cellular" part refers specifically to dividing up the terrain into cells, finding which cell the phone is in, and assigning it to a tower based on that determination.
(This is all pretty irrelevant to the point I was making above that cellular network operators can easily choose not to use the location information or signal strength information for anything other than routing calls, and that deciding that they can just use the information however they want would be creepy.)
That "approximation" is: "Which cell towers can hear your phone transmit, and how strong is the signal?" Your cell phone would work just as well as a phone if you disabled the GPS chip, but your location can be estimated by triangulating from signal strength. It's not nearly as precise, or as accurate, as a GPS-provided location would be, of course.
The context of this thread is Android and Apple's tracking of location history and I'm just trying to stay on topic. Not without downvotes, natch.
This isn't Reddit, I'm not an idiot, and I know how cellphones work. Try to be more charitable.
Perhaps because that was never asserted.
> Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times.
https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC...
But even just the connection cell tower number is enough to determine whether or not you're at home or work.
Cellphones are called cell phones because they divide the world into location-based cells which determine which antenna your phone talks to. At the very least, the telephone company knows which cell you are located in to communicate with you.
Unless you can find concrete evidence that Google publicly and directly makes this data available to others, how is this a violating of your privacy? In using the device with the GPS enabled, you are agreeing that the device can know and use this data.
Why am I agreeing to that? For what purposes can they use the data?
As in your example - it's not about whether they know the data, it's about what they do with the data and whether they have my permission to do things with it. It is obvious to me that a website has permission to send reply packets to my IP. It's somewhat obvious that it has permission to keep short-term logs for technical debugging, with strict access controls and audits (stricter if it's something like an adult site that would be embarrassing/sensitive if it leaked). It's definitely not obvious that they have permission to share the IP internally for the employees' amusement, even leaving aside external sharing.
It's the same with location services on my phone - it's obvious that if I have GPS on, and I open the map app of my choice, and it says "This app would like your location" and I say yes, I want that app to have my location. It's also obvious that I want the cell phone towers to be able to route calls to me. It's not obvious that I want the company that happens to write my phone's OS to use my data for marketing / profit purposes.
Google gives me a dashboard with everything laid out they track and not aware of anything like that from Apple?
I am probably unusual as love the data as need to refer to it to remember stuff for expense reports and such. We also have Google homes in our house and GW and I carry a pixel 2 XL and an iPhone but feel like Google is properly giving me a choice.
Btw, it is next to impossible to cancel our cable but Google procatively gives me a link to what they track and make it very easy to delete if I desire.
... but as a result, they are, perhaps, unable to deliver the product Google can. Consider [https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat; previously discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653]
... which is fine; Apple doesn't need to be in the business of providing the best mapping software available on a smartphone. But Google appears to be in that business.
I suppose it's theoretically possible that an app like Yelp could do that, but iOS pops up a "Do you want to allow this app to track your location when you're not using it?" notification whenever an app wants to do so, and of course that's always an instant push of the "hell naw" button for me.
This whole post just gets sillier as it goes. It's dire and creepy and "robotic" for Google to acknowledge that your phone, the internet, and their business are machine-driven, and to be open + straightforward about the fact that said machines can make good use of your human judgement + opinion, for the benefit of other humans? They need to "soften this blow"? Really?
Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services
Then turn off everything in the Product Improvement section, turn off Significant Locations and anything else in there you don't want.
Done
The blog author freaked out because Google is trying to crowdsource info about a place from people who are actually visiting it, which they know because their phone has location tracking. I think the author might want to step back and think about everything his phone can do before getting worked up over this one minor aspect.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6745525
Privacy is the capacity to define, have respected and defend, boundaries on personal intrusions. Google and other surveillance capitalism companies expressly fail to allow such limits to be stated, and silently change settings, or subvert them.
Enough already.
... web portal that Sprint provides law enforcement to conduct automated “pings” to track users. Through the website, authorized agents can type in a mobile phone number and obtain global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of the phone.
There is a common misconception that GPS is some sort of surveillance system that can return the position of a receiver.
They allow network-based location (like signal triangulation), where the location needs to be withing 100 meters for 67 percent of calls and 300 meters for 95 percent of the calls, and handset-based navigation (like GPS) where it has to be within 50 meters for 67% of calls, and within 150 meters for 90% of calls.
Within those guidelines, I think that the phone provider can propose methods to use and have them approved by the FCC. But I guess whether your "precise" location gets tracked depends on the level of precision you're thinking of.
And in the future, with the Librem phones, we’ll also be able to ensure there is no tracking on the device side.
What happens if they get a law enforcement request with warrant/subpoena? I bet the data is there to be delivered. If they aren't _very_ intentional about scrubbing it, it's maybe there in some historical logs too.
(And, for what it's worth, Apple has fought against a valid subpoena for iPhone data that they did technically have the capability of answering.)
I am pleased that the publicity (mainly from Snowden release) has led some businesses to fight subpoenas and/or warrants in court. I definitely don't count on them to keep doing it, pretty easy for them to silently comply (even _without_ a warrant/subpoena) without publicity, as most everyone has generally done until recently (and I suspect still does often).
Also, if you fight in court and lose in court, pretty sure any company will of course hand over the data at that point.
Under current German and EU law, they can only keep logs as long as technically necessary. If a warrant, specific to me, personally, exists, they can collect future connection info. And I’m okay with that – requiring a warrant specifically to be written for me, specifically signed by a judge, and in a way that they can’t be rubberstamped is okay, and about the level of surveillance that is a reasonable tradeoff.
The law notwithstanding, minimizing personally identifiable information in logs actually requires intentional and positive action (meaning additional hours/expense). If you just let all your systems produce what logs they do by default, get backed up if they happen to get backed up, etc. -- you will have quite a bit more logging bits sitting around than you probably realized or intended or needed. Is it more than is "technically necessary"? I am not sure what that phrase means legally or practically. But I doubt that law has actually resulted in companies spending significant additional staff time minimizing logs they didn't really mean to be keeping int the first place. It is not a trivial operation.
This is Germany – the place where the requirement for websites to contain a working contact address in the real world is enforced not through law, but through people just suing every website owner whose site doesn’t have an imprint.
The ISP is only keeping as much as absolutely necessary, because every bit more would be an unnecessary legal liability. Personal data is a liability, not an asset.
Of course, there’s also companies with different viewpoints, but this one doesn’t keep any more than absolutely necessary.