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> I'm sure you believe that corporations are evil and basically out to get you, but the vast majority of people doesn't. I think it's safe to assume that you're the outlier here.

I've worked in ad tech before. I used to write code to do some of this tracking and enable analytics on it. Nobody I worked with was out to antagonize users, but in principle I'd rather not feed a master profile about myself that gets matched, bought, and sold between companies and their partners. There's nothing controversial about my movement throughout the day but I feel better not being tracked.

You're being tracked anyway just by having your phone turned on.

Regarding your first paragraph, let me quote from the HN guidelines [1]:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not about the majority - don't you see that?

It's about the 1-3% who will f* you for being a naive sheep.

That is why we can't trust these corporations and that they get more powerful everyday doesn't ease my mind (accumulation until we only have "the shop").

The problem with our economy is the basis for that. In our world (at least in the west, can't really compare that to the east as I only know it from western propaganda) the biggest goal is MONEY (=POWER).

Ethics, environment and people just don't count in this equation (ok they do if you want to improve your image).

Sure that's not what majority of the people sees but also they don't know anything about computers & software and most of them probably haven't thought much about ethics & philosophy. Just because majority does something is not a very good argument (see lemmings).

I’d also pay for the ability to see where I was at a particular time, as it does seem like a very useful feature. In fact, I did pay for it by obtaining an iOS app that stores location history locally.

Google’s implementation looks really convenient but feels too creepy to me.

this isn't about privacy. I literally charge my phone less, because not only does gps coming on randomly eat up battery - when it has data to collect from random apps they make a data connection and send stuff home. I could care less about going back, tracking my location history, and correlating it with other data. I have a life, and gps on, after a day of the phone sitting there on standby, eats an extra 5% of battery.

turning gps on before i launch maps is 1 extra tap on the toggle on my home screen.

I think the one with a traumatic experience here is you - one that prevents you from seeing very basic logic for the use case of GPS off.

off topic but it always irks me when people get it wrong: it’s “I couldn’t care less”

ask some Rohingya from Myanmar?

That’s a problem with the Myanmar government, not location-based services. People have also been jailed for articles they publish in newspapers or private letters they write. In those cases no one blames the act of writing letters- it’s fairly obvious that the government that’s reading mail is to blame, not the letter-writing in the first place.