Google’s Sensorvault Is a Boon for Law Enforcement
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
On the good side it used to be remarkably accurate at identifying and tracking stops along with routes I had driven. At the same time it would have occasional astonishing jumps such as the 15 minutes I once spent in South Korea during the middle of the day.
At some point they appeared to dumb it down pretty radically and it would no longer even recognize that I had been at a location even when I had been there for hours.
These days I use a separate unfortunately discontinued app for tracking location and uploading to my own cloud storage a few times a day.
I've given up on Google not being evil, but it might be nice if they could avoid being so freaking creepy.
At this point the software I'm using for mileage tracking covers that (and will show my route using a certain ubiquitous mapping system), but I still have that package generating kml files and uploading them twice a day.
Edit: looks like just over 5 years of daily kml files, likely mostly useful for showing just how few new places I go.
It's also capable of pinging a url with location data if you prefer.
Edit: this may be interesting from someone else actively using it for their own tracking and reporting (includes parsing scripts) https://petermolnar.net/location-tracking-without-server/
At the same time, I get some slight value out of it. I find the history (and the monthly reminder e-mails that location history is on) mildly interesting to look at every now and then. On very rare occasions, I've been able to get some specific usefulness out of location history (I found a restaurant I previously visited on a road trip).
Now that I think of it bad things will happen as well even if the data was accurate.
My expectation for the absurd jumps was that Google was calculating locations based on identifying WiFi devices in the vicinity and that for some devices there were duplicate MACs distributed in different regions (or possibly that the MAC on some equipment was being set from configuration rather than being hard-coded). I did not check to see if any of them were 00:DE:AD:BE:EF or the like since I generally only noticed several weeks after the event.
A. make money because that's the most important thing (e.g. China population surveillance projects).
B. Keep the trust busters at bay by making itself useful to the government any way it can (e.g. this).
Google shows so many more ads today than 3 years ago. It's all Pichai's doing.
Your chosen education has nothing to do with how big of a douche bag you chose to be.
he has a bachelors and masters in engineering from IIT and Stanford. only then MBA from wharton. granted he did not study computer science, but he is leagues different from a accounting-only number-crunching management-jargon MBA.
Being concerned about your location privacy and having a connected cell phone in your possession at all times are mutually exclusive ideas with the current state of things. Short of major legal changes it will not be possible.
The point about carriers is the most valid though. That’s the weakest point in location privacy.
That disables the location tracking specifically for the purposes of location history, but not any of google’s location tracking for other purposes. Who’s to say whether that other data like “was at X when you opened google maps” ends up in the same location database that these warrants are querying?
https://www.wired.com/story/google-location-tracking-turn-of...
Your opening maps question is an interesting one, I automatically assume any data that goes to their servers is fair game, so if I'm asking Google to give me driving directions or even open a map and show me where I am (which requires loading map data for the area), I'm clearly making that choice.
I suppose it's possible they could behave better, but once data leaves my device, it's out of my control and I have to assume the worst.
This is from congressional testimony in the past month that hasn't gotten virtually any coverage from the traditional media outlets:
>Hawley pointed out on Tuesday that a user's location is sent to Google hundreds of times a day, even when the phone is not in use. In fact, Hawley said, a user's location is tracked "every four minutes, or 14 times an hour, roughly 340 times during a 24-hour period," even when the phone is not in use.
>DeVries confessed that "location information is absolutely core to making a mobile phone work the way that you want it to work." He said that Google has an "optional service" called Location History that is opt-in and "can collect location over time when people turn that on."
>"But Google collects geolocation data even if Location History is turned off, correct?" Hawley pressed.
>"Yes, senator, it can in order to operate other services—"
Google's privacy head was passing off the location data harvesting as something that is necessary for the phone to function, which is untrue. They are using the devices to surveil on people, which, among other things, allows intelligence agencies to outsource an important task.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-tracks-you-even-when-loc....
The actual hearing itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwyuCtbK3qw
Your first link is broken, but if you think I'm mistaken here, please point me in the direction of a technical analysis showing this, I'd love to see it.
More quality New York-centrism from The New York Times :P
> Google, which already employs about 7,000 in the city, has its New York headquarters at 111 Eighth Avenue, one of the city’s largest buildings that it bought in 2010.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-new-york/...
> Google's current New York Headquarters is in the former Port Authority of New York building. It occupies an entire long city block between 8th and 9th Avenues and between 15th and 16th Streets.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/google-announces...
It doesn't suit me.
Rooting and install another Android OS is no easy task for a normie and comes with it's own maintenance baggage. And even then you have to install Google's proprietary software to even use the App Store.
A phone without the app store is a no-go for 99% of people.
The solution is allow the customers the option to "turn it on" (especially after they pay $300-900 for a phone) rather than being omnipresent.
"Location History is not on by default. Google prompts users to enable it when they are setting up certain services — traffic alerts in Google Maps, for example, or group images tied to location in Google Photos.'
Maybe you don't remember it, but you can look at old version of Android and they all ask very clearly if you want it or not.
I guess maybe you didn't understand what was implied? But it was definitely asked.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/433742-google-takes-he...
It's been stretched by media to make it sound nefarious, but no one has shown that they're actually sending location data when history is disabled and you're not using maps.
The only thing location history toggles is whether your location data is branched off to the location history product line. It does not toggle the existence of that data or the fact that it's archived at several other points.
Take the time to watch the congress hearing and note the very carefully worded answers and why they are worded that way.
Ultimately though, you're still not getting around being tracked, your cell provider collects that location data even if Google doesn't. Just having a cell phone and a SIM puts you in a pretty awful state privacy wise.
> For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app
Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. In order to download map tiles around you, show nearby stuff, traffic, etc they need to know where you are. So yes, that means they get your location.
But that has nothing to do with the sort of periodic background location reporting used in Location History that people are concerned about. Disabling Location History and not using Maps or other Google location based apps or APIs means they won't get your location.
Also note that there's no mention of play store access, phone calls or any other sorts of usages which seem like they shouldn't ask for location in that article.
They make a bit of a big deal about searching for "chocolate chip cookies" not requiring localized results, but from a technical perspective I think it's obvious that they just send it with the request regardless, they don't know . Trivial to disable if you don't want that though. In fact, both this an the Maps example will happen even on iOS devices as the article points out.
When I said I found those claims exaggerated last time I looked into it, this is exactly what I meant. They must get a lot of clicks by making this stuff out to be more nefarious.
Which is impossible unless you don't use the phone at all, hence the 3 hour long congressional hearing[1]. Turn off location history, turn off location services, it doesn't matter, your location tracks are being logged.
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue about since you seem agree with the premise. You think the news outlets exaggerated the fact that Google grossly underplayed the language around their always-on tracking and mislead hundreds of millions of users into thinking they're not being tracked when they in fact were? Okay then.
Achieving this on an Android device isn't impossible by any means: deny location to all apps and those apps won't be able to call the Google Fused Location API. If you want location without using Google's API, allow only select apps which use direct on-device GPS access, it's readily available in the Android API without the need to pull in the Google Play Location Services package.
Yes, there's literally a button you can press. No rooting, no reflashing necessary.
Google Account -> Data & Personlization -> Location History
Done. In fact, as is mentioned in this article even, Google explicitly alerts you when you first enable it and allows you to opt out of it.
Once you've done this, the only time Google will get your location is if you use Maps or Location API services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention
How do I turn that off?
I know, that's not a phone, really. But that's life, these days.
Death
Taxes
Tracking
"You are Number Six".
"I am not a number. I am a free man!"
Laughter.
But thats only because the warrants werent sealed by the judge, the state law allowed for public knowledge, the detectives were willing to talk with media, and those available warrants happened to use discretion that is more agreeable so far.
So lets not get this confused with something good. All these people know it is a questionable tool and that as soon as they or anyone else in the public sector uses this more broadly then it is going to mess up their ability to use the tool at all.
If I understand your argument, you're saying that, yes, this tool has been used justly so far, but it's still not good, because those using it would have behaved unjustly if there were no consequences for just behavior?
I don't really think this argument flies. There are so many other things that have this property and are widely considered to be good things.
Bad = additional tool state uses to potentially circumvent established rights in an unexpected way, which may result in prior assumptions about established rights becoming obsolete in subsequent court rulings
Good = things that dont do that
Yes, the consequences are a check on the use of this tool.
Its astonishing what companies and law enforcement can do. For instance, people are concerned with some of Trump's laws/actions already. Why would we want to give him or anyone in such a position the ability to sweep up whole populations based on being near an event. It goes beyond that obviously, Google can predict movement and predict interests, even what you'll say at this point.
Eventually, law enforcement will be issuing a warrant on the model which predicts/represents you as well.
Yes, iOS has a superficially similar feature called Significant Locations [1].
No, it doesn't work anything like Sensorvault. Significant Locations are collected and stored locally on the device. They are only used to provide relevant suggestions to the user of the device (e.g, to suggest Maps destinations based on where the user frequently travels), not for advertising or analytics.
People forget that with google you are always the “product”; even when you buy a $900 device.