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Comment by panpanna | Hacker News Reader

What I really want is the ability to turn on GPS without allowing Google to see any data, not even "to improve our services" which is legal speak for "it's ours now, we can do whatever we want".

I am pretty sure Google is not following GDPR in this regard. You cannot force people give you data just because they provide an unrelated service (search) on the same platform.

Edit: to clarify, I want to remove Google maps, install Here or Bing maps it whatever and that should be enough to not send a single positioning sample to Google.

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You can turn off Google Location Accuracy (and keep GPS only), in Location setting.

Google Location Accuracy claims that enhanced location data is anonymous.

So you just need "Maps" app from F-Droid?

I think you missed my point.

GPS is so entangled in the OS that as soon as you enable it ten different Google services will record and send your positioning data to different departments at google. But I have ZERO interest in giving anyone my location. I don't care what cool service you have, not interested sorry.

The problem is that as soon as you _enable_ GPS on Android a dialog is shown telling you Google will use your data. If you don't agree, GPS will be turned back off.

(This by itself is a clear GDPR violation, by the way)

I see. Then you need to escape Google with a GNU/Linux phone like Librem 5 or Pinephone.

That compromises your security (and therefore privacy) by not taking advantage of the secure HARDWARE that Google offers,

which is incredible when decoupled from their proprietary spyware and just used with Android Open Source Project (AOSP), or a variant, like GrapheneOS or CalyxOS.

That is not true. You can use GPS without A-GPS on Google Android builds. Just disable Location Service. This is unlike iOS.

Google has multiple services that use GPS. Location services is just one.

Example: security services bypass the location settings.

Those only send your location to Google when they are used, unlike AGPS, which sends it whenever any app looks up location data. GGP comment complained about the latter, which is easy to turn off on Android and impossible to turn off on iOS.

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