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Comment by lazyeye | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else find this a little ironic given Google is a company that has been logging peoples location to a very fine detail for years

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I have four arguments as to why google are behaving this way with regards to this data. I’ve no idea which, if any, they operate by:

1. It’s actually crap and they don’t want their advertisers to know that their ads are sold based on crap quality data/don’t want the backlash of doing a poor job helping

2. Most people at google care a lot about privacy (either in the secret kept between you and google sense or the more common sense definition people seem to use on hn) and they don’t really think about this data as something the firm has/should release

3. They are afraid that if governments realised they had this data then google would be regulated or every minor security agency/random government department would be demanding access to it by law.

4. They strongly feel that surveillance by (well intentioned?) private companies is ok but by governments it os not.

> 2. Most people at google care a lot about privacy (either in the secret kept between you and google sense or the more common sense definition people seem to use on hn)

When I worked at Google, I saw a lot of earnest efforts to keep data private, in a way that really was sufficient (k-anonymized with large k, for example), but in ways that have no outward proof that it was happening. Send all possible data to the server, then make sure it's properly clustered and scrubbed before it gets stored or analyzed. And it's not easy to explain to someone who can see the whole system that from an end-user's view this is identical to just scooping up everything.

I can verify that, from an outsider's perspective, this is indistinguishable from just scooping up everything and saying "trust us, we care about your privacy".

Doesn't this mean other people who might MITM the data flow (like NSA) would get the whole lot instead?

I work at Google but don't have any visibility into this project, nor do I speak for Google on this. My uninformed guess is that the answer is more precisely:

5. They very much want this project to succeed so that it can save lives. They know privacy concerns are (rightly) an existential threat to the success of the project, so they are trying to address those by drawing this firm line.

It's not 1 or 3 because anyone can look at the location data Google gathers on them and judge for themselves if it's crap. Just search for "view google location history" and it will take you right there.

I think 2 is pretty close to the mark. Despite HN's understandably cynical take, everyone I talk to at Google cares a lot about user privacy.

"Just search for "view google location history" and it will take you right there."

is that really all there is? they are showing you everything? theres no shadow profile?

Why do people/google suddenly start caring about privacy now?

You can only see the tiny fraction of data that relates to you, and only the data that has been identified to you. This says very little about the quality of the rest of the data google have. Doing the double slit experiment once with a single election will not tell you much about quantum mechanics.

Re: #1 The quality of their location data is pretty easy to audit personally by looking at ones location history.

I expect google buys data from data brokers and this is counted as sufficiently anonymous to not be included in the location history google shows. But this misses the point because looking at your location history shows you the quality of a tiny fraction of Google’s location data and don’t tell you much about the rest of the data

And it's fantastic. I love the location timeline feature they build for you from it.

3. It's worth considering that governments may or are likely to have people within these big firms.

Also, Google and Apple where part of PRISM. So there is a history of cooperation.

And we'll see how this plays out, perhaps it will be tragically ironic. The majority of people don't ever think about this and are happy to give their location info to Google constantly all day long. This protocol is in almost all ways much less intrusive and more protective of privacy, and the upside for society is potentially high.

It should be a complete no-brainer that everyone who is ok using google or apple maps, i.e. probably 95+% of the country, be ok downloading their local health department's contact tracing app if it uses these APIs. But we'll see how it plays out, in the end it will surely come down to how this is politicized and not actually be based on the technical merits of this protocol at all.

It all seemed so innocent and helpful a decade ago...

Free GPS and navigation services have a price. I doubt many people are going back to Garmin anytime soon. Just the way it is now.

any time I've used garmin over the years it had been only slightly better then useless.

there are other options though. ive been using openstreetmap for about 4 years and have only found the need to use Google once in all that time. although with openstreetmap being crowd sources it really depends on how much work has been done in a particular area but in my country its pretty decent

And Apple.

Apple logs location history? Other than the wifi location log from ios4 and the significant locations feature (opt in, device only), I don't know how apple is logging locations.

On your iPhone you can go to Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services -> System Services -> Significant Locations and you will see that Apple does keep track of at least some of your location history and tries to analyze it if you don't actively turn it off.

On my iPhone running iOS 13, I had to go a level deeper to find that: Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services -> System Services -> Significant Locations.

To view Significant Locations, I have to provide my Touch ID again. Also, the fine print says "Significant Locations are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be read by Apple." Text repeated in "Location Services & Privacy"[0].

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207056

Is there any negative consequences to turning that off? What are those locations used for?

If you click on the link in the post you respond to, it explains what the locations are used for.

Thanks, but that's not very specific.

> It is used to provide you with personalized services, such as predictive traffic routing, and to build better Memories in Photos.

> you will see that Apple does keep track of at least some of your location history

That's not Apple keeping the data, that's your phone keeping the data. And that data isn't accessible to Apple - only you and your device.

From page 6 of https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Location_Services_White_P...

"This data is not shared with third parties, is fully encrypted, and can’t be read by Apple."

That claim is worthless when the software is closed source. It's impossible to verify.

Claims aren't worthless, they'd be breaking the law if they lied. Apple has a pretty decent incentive to not break the law (PR mostly, but also fines), so I would bet they're telling the truth here.

And as we all know, and history shows, those incentives ensure corporations never break the law.

If security researchers couldn't audit closed source software they would be pretty rubbish at their jobs. It's a lot easier to audit open source of course, but researchers do reverse engineer closed source stuff all the time.

Well you can always look at the network packets, most easily accomplished from jailbroken devices. There are many people who look at such matters. It's far from worthless.

Can't Apple push silent code updates to specific phones? That would mean they can access that data whenever they choose to. Even if they don't do it right now, they retain that ability.

Actually the claim is worth a big payday if you can prove Apple lied. One leak of customer data and Apple is screwed.

>One leak of customer data and Apple is screwed.

Yes, the Equifax incident really showed us how data leaks ruin companies.

Not true. The iOS location history is encrypted and stored in your iCloud account with a key that never leaves your device. So it's quite different from Google's Location History: Apple stores it, but they cannot read it.

And if you disable iCloud, the data remains exclusively on your device.

That iCloud key only prevents man in the middle attacks. You can still use the key to decrypt the data at rest in the cloud servers, and Apple stores both.

And if you're in China, Apple stores both on Chinese government owned servers: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-...

Not only it does but I even remember a story of a crime that was solved in Germany a few years ago just by requesting from Apple the history of the locations.

"I remember a story that is the entire opposite of what you said". If you have an argument to make based on a specific event, you're going to have to do better and provide some sources. "I remember a story", are we going to throw the full privacy history of Apple away based on your "history" that you remember? Please provide sources or do some research before you comment.

You can’t put Apple and Google in the same bucket when it comes to privacy.

Sure, neither is probably perfect, but only one of them is an egregious violator whose business model depends on surveillance capitalism

apple is closed source and extremely secretive so i will keep putting them in the same bucket thanks

That seems like a different topic than privacy’s relationship to their business model...

Are you talking about the one that won't let you install apps on your own phone without telling it who you are? They're the same. If anything, Apple is worse.

It is very valuable information, why would they let you access it if they dont have to?

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