Man sues over Google’s “Location History” fiasco, case could affect millions | Hacker News Reader

Man sues over Google’s “Location History” fiasco, case could affect millions

arstechnica.com

149 pointsplasticchris37 comments

Things that may or may not be true:

1) Google and other bigtech are essentially private sector branches of the U.S. intelligence community.

2) Google,Facebook and other not-so-famous companies are interested in not just behavioral analytics but also in behavior control and modification.

3) Google and Facebook can do a lot worse and get away with it,so long as they do it slowly. It's not thay they want world domination or just making more money,they're more concerned abour control. Making things more predictable,not leaving important decisions and situations to chance and free will. Of course some individuals have political ambitions (Eric Schmidt's new america initiative for example).

4) Whoever controls them,controls the country and western civilization. Even the greatest men will find that kind of power too difficult to wield without selfish and malicious intent.

It's history stuck in a for loop,rulers vs the ruled.

Great analogy ... and that loop's been iterating for 5000 years ...

It has,we pretend it's something new when it isn't and refuse to learn from history.

Only 5000?

Wow, for once I could be a class member in a lawsuit that I'd actually like to succeed. The only problem I foresee is measuring damages, but it's California, so it might be possible to get them up to a billion. It'll take at least that for Google to give a shit.

Bypassing article and "skimresources" monetization (crypto coin mining?) leads to the actual court filing.[1] He's suing in California.

[1] http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4777351-gov-uscourts-...

Skimresources is probably an affiliate link thing (although they also try to sell your data to power targeted advertising), see: https://skimlinks.com/

Source: I used to work there.

> Until the Associated Press story on August 13, Google's policy simply stated: "You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored."

Hey, that's because it's in "activity history" ;)

Dang, can we lose the ?amp=1 from the URL please?

This is one of several reasons why I stopped buying android phones

I believe this also affects iPhone users that utilize Google services like Maps and searching via Chrome.

I don't have any google applications installed on the iPhone. I use the native mail application connected to gmail for looking at my mail, and the browser has google as the default search engine. That's about it

Apple Maps does of course not use Google Maps and the Google Maps app doesn’t track your location while you aren’t navigating. No app gets to track your location if you don’t allow it.

This suit is all about alleged this and alleged that and then it’s presented as the truth while there is no proof at all. Perhaps the Android part is going anywhere but my money is on at least the iPhone part disappearing rather quickly. Perhaps the idea is to bully Apple into a settlement with some negative press attention, well good luck with that.

you could just stop using gapps in your phone like i do with Lineage OS

Love to be one of the juries in this case!

It won't go to a jury, but if it did I guarantee no one with a HN account will be on it.

Yeah I've only been called for jury duty once, but I noticed that any potential juror who seemed to have particular expertise or background in the subject matter of the case was dismissed with a peremptory challenge.

Non AMP version here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/did-google-viola...

Please dont post amp links.

Works fine for me. Do you have a specific complaint about it not working in your browser?

It's formatted for mobile, for one.

Maybe so, but I think it looks better than the regular page on desktop. Instead of header and sidebar clutter, you have whitespace, and it has fewer ads.

I find the mobile version of arsetechnica much easier to read than the non-mobile version. There's less crap strewn about the body of the text (random plugs for other articles, in-line links, etc)

Did you mean amp or the actual mobile version ?

I thought amp was the mobile site?

Their default mobile site is non amp, I think the amp version is only served through google search

What is AMP? Why is it bad?

AMP is a Google CDN where they restrict the variety of web technologies publishers may use. In return, Google gets more tracking data.

Some people don't like Google, so they don't want to load pages from AMP servers.

What additional data does Google get through AMP that they don't get through Google Analytics?

Nothing, OP is ignorant. Google does AMP to make webpages faster cause they make money from people clicking on links.

Google lock in, like Microsoft's MSN idea in 1995... Google wants you to never leave their servers, so they can track much more and much easier. Just bad for a free and open web.

Google Analytics is easily blocked while still having access to the content. Loading the full content from their AMP servers is an all-or-nothing scenario. It effectively moves Google from being a 3rd party to a 1st party and the content provider becomes the 3rd party instead

It isn't only about the data. When people visit AMP pages from Google Search, they aren't visiting your site. They are visiting a restricted shell of it that is hosted on google.com with a left-right swipe that takes users off of your site instead of deeper inside it. It restricts your markup and monetization, and is one of the largest threats to the WWW at the moment. The web is supposed to be decentralized. Also, mobile-first doesn't mean mobile-everywhere.

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/google-amp-not-good-thing/

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...

IMO the AMP version's limited HTML elements make it much less of a pain to visit a website without the website filling up 20%+ of my screen with ads.

There’s cases where it’s distinctly slower though.

For this article, it might be due to caching strategies, but the non amp loads way faster for me (in perception about a second faster to start to read the article).

Is there a HN guideline about this?

We've changed the URL to take the amp bit out.

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