Hacker News Reader

Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

What does 'don't require permission' mean? I've assumed that when G says in a settings page that I've disabled location upload, that's more or less binding (regardless of whether the location info comes from GPS, wifi, LTE towers, or maxmind).

Have I misunderstood?

View on HN

Yes I think you are misunderstanding what the poster means. When you make a request to an external server, you are giving that server your IP address. There is no way you can stop an external server from them taking your IP and looking up your IP in a geolocation database.

Therefore this kind of location lookup does not require permission.

I can't stop it from doing a location lookup against my IP, you're right. But this is a google service, they can choose to abide by the settings button that I flipped to off. I'm confused by why they aren't.

Does such a setting actually exist? I think you’re misunderstanding.

I think awinter-py means that because they turned off location services, Google should not look up their location by IP and display the weather even if they can.

But yeah, that's not what the location API means.

To be clear, this isn't a third-party weather app -- it's a feature built into android that just appeared one day. There doesn't seem to be a way to turn it off.

You’re accessing an internet service for the weather, therefore they get your IP, then there’s services out there that map IPs to locations. You can test this by using a VPN and visiting a weather site with GPS/etc turned off. It will show you the weather for the location of your VPN node.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com