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Comment by benjoffe | Hacker News Reader

It seems a bit extreme to offer apps one of two extremes: either my sub-metre location or no location at all. It seems the reasonable default for location sharing should be something like sharing the rough suburb that I'm in. This solves most use-cases such as showing closest store locations, delivery options, dating apps showing nearby matches, etc. It's only the occasional navigation app that needs to know exactly where the user is located.

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I specifically get directions “home” to a neighbor’s house a bit away. Once I know where I am, I kill Google Maps. I’m sure they could, if they wanted to badly enough, figure the whole thing out, but at least my profile has a certain amount of uncertainty (though what utility that has is probably debatable).

I would love to be able to fuzz my location within a certain (randomized?) radius of my home for certain apps. Strava has a ‘privacy circle’ that essentially accomplishes this when sharing GPX tracks of runs around one’s home. An OS-level feature would be fantastic in many cases.

Have you ever checked https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb to see? In my case, google knows where my phone is during the night: at home.

“No visited places”

None that they want to show you. I'm sure they still have the data and use it silently.

Absolutely. I generally don’t use Google Maps except as a fallback for when Apple maps isn't giving me what I’m looking for.

Based on what data?

The wifi and cell towers your phone can see, so even without using GPS. If you enable the location services of google, it keeps a history which is typically within 50 meters, within a few minutes accurate (at least in a city).

What google tracks if you disable location services, I don't know.

Just so you know, if you're using regular Google-infused Android, then depending on how you ‘kill’ Maps it may still be running in the background. And it may start in the background without you running the app.

I'd also bet that Google's other apps transmit your location anyway―if only because other apps use it too―and that it's not necessarily reflected in the timeline in the web profile.

> And it may start in the background without you running the app.

Are you sure about this? If an app is terminated, can it still run itself without you running it?

No.

Google Play Services is the underlying app the records and uploads your location to Google Timeline, and that restarts itself if it is force quit.

I have a different maps app (Yandex) that keeps popping up in the process list despite me killing it off with ‘force stop.’ Probably not the only one, for that matter.

Flicking an app in the recent apps list doesn't close its background processes. And you won't see it there when such a process runs again. See e.g. the ‘OS Monitor’ app for the actual list of processes (for Android ≤6).

Google's apps are likely even more privileged. Play Store hogs the processor and network every time I enable wifi. On a past phone, Google Maps also ran conspicuously on boot and, iirc, when wifi was turned on.

Something might've changed in newer versions of Android, dunno. But I doubt it that Google would limit its own abilities.

> I would love to be able to fuzz my location within a certain (randomized?) radius of my home for certain apps

I'm not sure about the details of the implementation but with location you still want something reasonably accurate. So the random radius can't vary too wildly. After you collect enough data points couldn't you infer the real location from that circle?

That’s why iOS 13 added a share location once button, in addition to the existing share forever and share forever even when the app isn’t running.

That's a good feature but quite different, if the user is at home when they need to use the app that first time then it reveals where the user lives and possibly personally identifies them.

Your IP address when on WiFi almost certainly can be connected to a specific address by a databroker. That doesn't mean location shouldn't be limited in resolution, but there are other ways to get the same thing.

The ip address is also not going to be shared with apps anymore starting in iOS 13

How? When an app makes an API request, the client IP address is (necessarily) exposed to the server.

Oh, you’re right of course, I was misremembering that they won’t be able to get the ssids of nearby wifi networks. However, a vpn is a solution to the ip address problem.

My ISP rotates IP addresses between users, so you can't match IPs to addresses. Quite often GeoIP doesn't even get my city right.

Isn’t is usually SSIDs that are used for location mapping of WiFi access points. The mapping cars gather that information when they’re doing street view stuff.

There is a difference between sharing your IP address with a data broker to maybe get your location (which may not even be possible with GDPR?), and having your exact GPS coordinates sent directly to your database.

People are actually working on something very similar to this in research [1]. By applying random noise to location data the user's individual privacy can be protected while still allowing for collection of usage (or in this case location) statistics etc. This is the key idea behind local differential privacy (which Apple also uses to collect anonymous statistics on usage data [2]).

[1] http://www.shivakasiviswanathan.com/ICDE16b.pdf

[2] https://machinelearning.apple.com/docs/learning-with-privacy...

Yahoo's Fireagle was an attempt to make a "Location broker" for apps. You could allow applications as much or as little detail as you like. I think it was a product before it's time.

Would this be possible with todays phone and hardware etc?

underrated idea! This is a great idea, and easy to implement.

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