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Comment by betolink | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking forward to the day that privacy and convenience are mainstream again(if there were ever). This feature is a right step on that direction.

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They were using an open source map company, not google maps. By that standard, I feel this is probably a privacy regression.

  I'm looking forward to the day when people know what they are talking about.

> They were using an open source map company, not google maps. By that standard, I feel this is probably a privacy regression.

I'm not sure this is a fair comparison. Open source is not the same as privacy-friendly.

Apple makes privacy a core-tenet of their product. I do not see the same stance from Mapbox.

Apples core tenet is making money, they have recently started making privacy a concern probably because they think that it will make money.

Every corporation’s legal core tenet is increasing shareholder value (i.e., make money). I’m more inclined to go with those who at least claim to protect privacy over those who don’t. :)

Every corporation claims to protect privacy

Google Claims to protect privacy as well. In fact they make a number of tools that are built just for that reason. But it's all marketing, and the tools are there only to really benefit Google. Just take a look at Android's Wi-Fi assistant that creates and automatic VPN to Google's servers.

My point is it isn't as back and white as companies claiming to protect privacy. At the end of the day Apple is just as bad.

sure, I raise an eyebrow at companies that 'protect privacy' but have an atrocious security record. You might try, but if you can't be bothered to check passwords for admin access in your own OS, I my not believe you have the capabilities to protect your own nuts.

I work at Mapbox. Not speaking officially for the company here (for that see https://www.mapbox.com/privacy/), but I can say it's definitely an internalized norm that in order to earn trust as a platform we need to be very careful with any user data we get. While user-generated location data does flow into updating our map, we are aggressive about anonymizing and aggregating that data as quickly as possible (including stripping out data on the client side).

But I agree Apple has consistently advertised their focus on privacy and backed it up with their actions.

Hey Chris, glad to hear that is an internal focus!

I hope for the sake of the Internet that one day discussions about privacy aren’t needed because it’s the default everywhere. Then everyone wins. :)

Except advertisers and industries propped up by that model

When was convenience not mainstream, except in the earlier days of the Internet before centralized logins (e.g. Google, Facebook), which are associated with a tradeoff in privacy?

Yeah, you're right. What I meant is that in our day they are mutually exclusive, either you have privacy or you have convenience. I like duckduckgo and I use it as my default search engine but we can agree that it lacks many of the convenient features Google maps has. So I'm looking forward to the day that privacy and convenience are the norm.

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