Holy shit. So my paranoia about turning off Google location tracking was completely well-founded, and way more quickly than I would have hoped.
GDPR can't come soon enough...
GDPR can't come soon enough...
GDPR enabled.
Anyway, the GSPR does not ban American-style surveillance in Europe. Most European countries have used the Snowden leaks as a blueprint to increase surveillance in almost every aspect, especially online and with many related obligations for Internet companies.
It’s possible (if unlikely) that after a militant based in Europe but geo-IP located elsewhere by accident notices something unsavoury and complaints, that companies implements an “Are you based within the EU?” toggle in account settings to avoid headaches.
For social services, I’m curious on how processes based on your friends’ will be implemented when your friends are partially in the EU and elsewhere. But I don’t expect this will be much harder than it currently is to circumvent, say, Netflix geo-blocks.
Hopefully it affects U.S. policy in the next decade or so.
P.S. I'm curious how you found my city. LinkedIn?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...
'“When you first get to Facebook you are shocked at the level of transparency. You are trusted with a lot of stuff you don’t need access to,” said Evans, adding that during his induction he was warned not to look at ex-partners’ Facebook accounts.'
It’s probably obvious but our best bet is in voting for Bernie Sanders.
...or with the large number of ordinary citizens who would oppose them or be indifferent to them. People here tend to have their privacy/safety balance set quite a bit more toward the "privacy" side than do most people.
Where most people draw the line, I think, is when surveillance is looking into their homes. Being surveilled when they are out and about in public does not bother them much.
LinkedIn's new policy that goes into effect in May appears to grant GDPR-like permissions across all users, for instance, though it does specify that EEA countries may have additional rights under the law. I suspect the majority of companies will end up complying with GDPR globally.
There are additional laws that could protect citizens against overreach. But something like the GDPR alone would not do the trick.
This is especially dangerous given that there is already overreach in which data on the correlation of travel and behavior with crime, is being used to unlawfully detain people: https://www.npr.org/2017/12/05/568351544/teens-arrested-on-g... This data would only serve to multiply that problem. It's not an easy problem to solve.
The NSA’s surveillance dragnet is a very different situation because they are a government agency, but you could see the same exact phenomenon happened when the Snowden revelations came out.
“Do you really think the government cares enough to log all your phone calls? You must be paranoid.” became “Well, obviously the government does this. How could you not expect this?” in the blink of an eye.
I love these comments, you seem them all the time (Everytime this happens if you will). And they are phrased as though they are above questioning.
You're looking for "Location History".
Just be aware that deletion isn't instant though. From the TOS:
>We aim to maintain our services in a manner that protects information from accidental or malicious destruction. Because of this, after you delete information from our services, we may not immediately delete residual copies from our active servers and may not remove information from our backup systems.
I don't really need it most of the time, and I find the sense of privacy liberating.
Subject: You are using Google Location Sharing to share your real-time location.
Hi Jeff,
To protect your privacy, we would like to remind you that you are sharing your real-time location using Google Location Sharing with [wife] and [close friend and housemate].
If you didn't enable this or want to stop sharing your location at any time, please go to your Google Location Sharing settings.
Thanks,
Google Location Sharing Team
Is there by chance another one with location history or am I imagining things?
I'm sure I get it by email approx once per month.
GDPR was approved on 14 April 2016. Google appears to have been complying for a while, starting to remove search results year ago.
I have heard of people getting a copy of all the data Google stored, but I haven't heard of location deletion requests yet. Will be interesting.
My main reason is to squash the annoying notifications about "heavy traffic in your area" at 5:00pm. Yeah, I would never have guessed...
The interesting question here is why law enforcement is going to Google instead of the cellular network providers directly? By definition, they're missing out on data from all non-Android phones.
I haven't read the original article since the website doesn't work without off-domain scripts running, but I assume that's why - they do have data for iOS users running Google apps, and that data is often higher resolution than cell tower triangulation. I'd also assume they're getting the cell information as well and correlating the two.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-your-cell-phon...
"On May 28th, Lisa Marie Roberts, of Portland, Oregon, was released from prison after serving nine and a half years for a murder she didn’t commit. A key piece of overturned evidence was cell-phone records that allegedly put her at the scene."
If it's as accurate and straight forward as law enforcement tell us - how did _that_ happen?
The government abusing data it collected on its citizens to silence dissenters, however, is something I've seen on a daily basis. And so, we set priorities.