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Comment by mscasts | Hacker News Reader

This is scary stuff. Thank you norway for taking the fight against Google.

How can you turn this off on an android?

Installing LineageOS without any Google apps (including Google Play Services) might be the only way to continue using Android minus the tracking. You lose quite a bit of convenience for this, though. And of course, you’re still being tracked by virtue of it being a cell phone with a baseband processor (see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18821444).

Your carrier will know where you are (and have been). Are you saying this information is also available to apps?

I meant more that it is very hard to completely avoid tracking and that the cell carrier is an often-overlooked part of the equation.

I will lookup LineageOS, thank you.

You can turn of "Location History" and "Web & App History", for your google account from https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-personalization

Before you deactivate them, I suggest looking through the data Google has saved in them for a while so you grok the full scale of how horrible those settings truly are.

Jeez, that is truly terrifying. I hate Google even more now.

I can see my history years back. It seems that I cannot delete it just "pause" it? Seriously?

EDIT: Found it, it was just hidden several layers down.

Darn you, now I had to go through the same process. The page to delete the data was not obvious to locate - scary and sad.

iOS is becoming more attractive by the day.

That's what it's become for me and my circle. Got my parents the older iPhones (6S) late last year and got the same for myself this month. I miss being able to access the local storage (one small hack I found was using the Firefox app local folder to store my files)

Did the same with my parents (SE + 6S) and alongside iOS I use Jolla Sailfish and ancient Nokia N9 with Meego (both pure hackable Linux).

Well, I just turn my location services off. I can't stand the Apple ecosystem even if I have to give them a huge props that they take integrity way more seriously than Google.

Maybe I should invest in a dumb phone.

If you're really willing to go to a dumbphone... just get an iPhone and don't install any apps. That way, at the very least, you still have a killer camera.

I have an iPhone 8 actually, but the screen is broken. Recently switched to an Samsung, which I now kind of regret.

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