Hacker News Reader

Comment by brylie | Hacker News Reader

I would really like to explicitly tell Google to stop tracking my location. Period. Despite what might be in their terms of service,this tracking is a violation of privacy. I have never given informed consent to such locstion tracking, and still get prompts to 'rate this location' despite having explicitly disabled location history. Google location tracking is increasingly unethical.

View on HN

I think your realistic options are to move the EU or to stop using Google. Maybe one day they'll offer a subscription based fee for it's services, but for now you pay with your data.

In EU they're still tracking you, for now. Every time I get near a McDonalds it asks me to take a photo of it.

That's because you've got location services turned on. There is an opt-out, but it does break Google Assistant.

it does break Google Assistant

From personal experience, it breaks a ton of stuff, including my patience with the endless "turn on location services" prompts.

I turned all assistant features off (search obviously still works) and only location on for apps. Location history and sharing are also off but I'm not sure if they still save some location information. I'll wait for the 25th May and then download data (I'm in the EU) to see what they have..

You now can download what's currently available through Google's Takeout. Maybe once GDPR is in effect more stuff can be available, but I'm not sure what those will be.

That's why I wait. Don't want to do the work twice in one month. It could be that they already provide all data but I'm only sure from the 25th.

I have location history off, but obviously need location turned on for my apps to work. I only want to turn off Google (I even froze the Google Search app).

France and Germany are looking pretty good these days.

Most EU countries do. Southern Europe can also be very nice and better suited if you don't like rain (although southern France works for that as well). Apart from the language barrier, moving within the EU isn't much more difficult than moving between states in the US.

>Apart from the language barrier

Like that's a small thing. I would love to move to Eastern Europe or Czechia, but alas

If Google or FB ever offered a paid option they would still track you. Why wouldn’t they?

Google offer enterprise services for a fee, and don't track you.

I wonder about this with news sites that are increasingly going paywalled. Do they also turn the tracking or even ads entirely off, or do we just pay money to be tracked now?

I am a paid subscriber to NYT and it’s still an adfest.

So buy an iPhone. They won't stop tracking you because that's how they make money. That's why their OS is free.

iOS is free

Not really. The price of iOS is baked into the (usually higher) costs of the hardware. The parent comment is presumably referring to the fact that Android phone manufacturers are allowed to put Android on their devices for free, as Google instead makes money on the advertising/service revenue they get from your usage of the OS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com