Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers
vice.com
vice.com
Arguable worse than R, C, or Word.
"Gee, let's take the most frequently occurring letter in English usage, and bracket it with Web-significant non-text punctuation."
"e Foundation" will find them.
No idea on status/news.
He gives regular status updates and they seem to be making good progress. I played with /e/OS a long time ago when it first came out and found the microg integration to be excellent (have had trouble in the past getting LineageOS + microg to work...). I am planning to flash /e/OS onto a phone again soon to see the latest progress.
Of course I am not using contact tracing either in this case, but I certainly won't allow Google to trace my location.
Of course, the very fact that these permissions are bundled is the reason why it's feasible to keep such databases up-to-date, and why up-to-date databases provide a continuously stronger case why Bluetooth should be considered a type of location permission..
It would be totally possible to separate location permissions between "passive" location (e.g. triangulation through received GPS coordinates), and "active" location, e.g. inference of location through indirect measures and correlations with historical databases.
Afaik it's now a system-wide setting to disallow said correlations, but offering app developers more fine-grained control would be better for all of us. Why does, for example, my Sony Bluetooth headset need my location just for updating some firmware..
> Google retains a detailed map of known Wi-Fi networks and access points. By knowing the exact location of these networks, and your proximity to them, its location services can gauge your location with roughly 30 feet of accuracy. [0]
[0] https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/how-google-uses-wi-fi-n...
30 feet sounds like cell tower triangulation.
It's sad we got the the point the customers are afraid their devices are selling them this badly, because you can't even tell if your settings have the effect you think they should have.
OK the second thing was "but I can't do almost anything with it :D "
Google and the likes have made it very difficult for you to be even aware that was an option.
People just don't care enough, even among my fellow geeks I had to "battle" to get them to install Signal because I couldn't use WhatsApp anymore.
We are bombarded with news about revolting situations and at one point there's so much outrage one can take. So the Evil Big tech spying is very low on the list of most people especially since they don't see the damage.
Well, that's not a GPS fix.
If you want a traceless position fix, use GPS Navstar / Glonass / Beidu / Galileo. Yes it takes longer from cold start, but that's the trade-off for privacy.
I actually feel so much better without all the google stuff, weird no?
I assume that even if Huawei’s Android sold in the West doesn't use Google Play Services, it still uses standard AOSP, and the issue is that Google geolocation (and some other use of Google servers) is hardcoded into AOSP.
And even if the OS isn't spying, the apps you install can spy, albeit less effectively.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/a23071/how_...
Looking it up now they rewrote this part of the browser, and either moved it somewhere else or obfuscated it better.
What about A-GPS MSA handling? [1]
[0] https://review.lineageos.org/c/LineageOS/android_frameworks_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-GPS#Modes_of_operation
https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview
So Google handed over info on 175k accounts in the last half of 2019 alone? It seems it's becoming common practice to routinely pull citizens data, without much of a warrant and without the target's knowledge. There used to be a thing called secrecy of correspondence, preventing governments from reading your letters. Now whenever your name lands on some clerk's desk, and he feels you might be hiding something, he just requests all your emails.
This is all necessary because of "terrorist & child porn", but in reality we got mass surveillance. Next up gonna be social scores, it's like total authoritarianism in the making.
You should assume your every interaction within the world is logged, your every tap, click, spoken and unspoken words. And act in accordance, there can a camera watching you, or a mic picking up your bigoted rant.
You can (I love miley cyrus) add fake data to your posts, misdirect AI tools, and throw them off the scent if you wish. You give them the information you want to (you should probably use your own router, DNS, VPN, other tools). Dinosaurs are awesome.
They can only store the data you're generating. Don't generate it? No data to access.
I live in Mexico and love Donald Trump.
This wastes your time and provides no value. Your fake data is insignificant noise compared to your real data signal.
> We Kill People Based On Metadata (Michael Hayden former NSA boss)
WTF? This makes me extremely uncomfortable for some reason. There was some hope in mind that Snowden was exaggerating but this is just insane.
It feels like liberty has failed. There's no other option but to give in and accept.
I submit to the overlords, but I'm not happy about this.
Maybe giving up on the "nobody must ever know", but maybe not in general?
There are still quite some steps from here to 1984, despite people dramatizing.
Without government help, the only way to fight the oppressive dystopia you talked about is by becoming Richard Stallman. And I value not living in a university office and having to use Lynx and pine.
Yes, there are options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone
So far they are using it for beamforming, but I think location tracking is also one of the advertised use cases.
2) When did people start losing their citizenship by breaking the law?
A few nights ago I was watching the 2002 film The Bourne Identity. There's a line where one of the characters is horrified that the government knows she's traveling with someone else. "How can they know we're together?!" she shrieks.
Today you just ask Google or Facebook, and it will tell you who's together, where, and for how long. And with a straight face they tell you it's a feature, not a bug.
I was using k9 for my personal stuff, and wanted another app for the pro mails, so I pulled out the gmail app.
Just one step before finalizing the setup process, I realized that google was asking me to accept Google Play terms of service.
WTF?
It turns out the gmail app setup process does much more, google takes over your entire phone, binding the omniscient google account to it, and all apps using google sdk, the calendar, maps, etc.
I innocently wanted to check my work mails, and if I hadn't being cautious, I would have given my whole life to Google despite the fact I took great length to never do that (I don't have a personnal gmail/youtube account, I use an alternative app store, etc.)
Sneaky, and scary. There is no way regular users notice that.
We now have fullstack client and server side malware built-in.
The article says they "just aren’t as good" which obviously isn't very specific, but if you live in an area where the map detail doesn't seem so good, then you're in luck. Adding details of your neighbourhood to OpenStreetMap is a lot of fun! Might seem like on odd way of looking at things, but seriously. You should try it. Contribute to a not-for-profit free and open map of the world!
As far as I know, OsmAnd is fine, and there’s also a couple of alternatives: https://gurumaps.app/ https://www.qwant.com/maps (Which can be installed as a PWA)
Maps.me is an advertising-based business, and it is also controversial in the OSM community because it fails to properly credit OSM in violation of OSM’s license.
The popular rhetoric that having an IP is having the location is most often wrong unless Your users have static IPs registered to them. The way law enforcement does it is by subpoening the owner of the IP of pointing to the user associated with the IP at specific time but that still is prone to errors because of NATs - many distinct clients behind a single address.
All in all fingerprinting is using IPs pretty rarely nowadays.
(Supposedly; I don't own an up-to-date Android device.)
2 settings, one for Wi-Fi scanning and one for Bluetooth
Your mileage may vary of course.
Seems insane to me, it's one of those thing you take for granted elsewhere, yeah of course my mobile ISP knows my location, as does the govt if they ask the ISP in an email, that's fine. (Quite sure most carriers have no qualms just handing it over on request)
But just selling that info for cents to any third party seems so utterly egregious and a massive betrayal of consumer trust.
Based on what evidence?
Having said that, both Apple APNS and Google FCM do send regular heartbeat to their respective servers which make your positional tracking possible by both companies.
I turned off mail sync, I only trigger it manually, so there is a way to avoid the constant checking.
If you had access to a significant portion of a country/world's emails, imagine the power you truly have.
two things i noticed beyond this "location history" that absolutely crepped me out - especially when it recorded a loop i took walking my toddler around our neighborhood at the time that was seriously better than any track that my garmin fenix could record of my runs:
1) simply asking the assistant : "call contact x" would say the assistant could not perform the task because it needed location history enabled -- why? it's in my contact list just execute the function!
2) simply asking the assistnat : "make alo call to contaxt x" would tell me the error above along with "google has not enabled that function yet". this was, at the time, the flagship of google and goole assistant couldn't even integrate with google's own apps?
it's amazing to me how people here defend android and google and the insane amount of information that they're giving to this company all because they want to sideload an app onto their phone? i can do the same thing on my iphone, no, it's not as easy or as quick as "allow aps from unkown sources", but christ, think about what you're giving up.
All these smart people they hire and amount of shit code in android is staggering. They never commit to fundamentally fix/rebuild basics, it's just library on top of library which need to distributed with every app to use basic stuff. (Why the hell is support library even a thing?, if they can push spying shit through google play services, they can push support libs too, and not have every app include it their builds). Kotlin because they screwed up with Java license, instead of building something ground up they take these ugly routes. Look at what Apple is doing x86-Arm, Swift in last 5/6 years?. Google is still hacking around on top of Java language/VM's after over 10 years.
For example, I've recently removed "Google Play Services" and much of Google stuff has disappeared. In settings of location, before I removed the app, it was mentioned that Google collects location data for something. Now it does not say so, with the app being gone. Does it mean Google no longer collects it, or is Google somehow app-independent, and there's no way of avoiding their grasp?
You can use something like Netguard to get some idea of what's going off your device (if you're rooted AFWall). It's not perfect, but it's essential software in my opinion. You can see somethings that of that get through Netguard on PiHole, if you have it setup on your network.
Removal of play services is one step, but pretty much every app on the phone from the stock keyboard ("Gboard") to all pre-installed apps call home. In the newer versions of Android, Gboard and other apps will complain every few seconds if/when Play Services is Disabled, as they don't get to send the telemetry and usage data to Google.
If Google and its apps have become an almost essential utility, and if government authorities can request information just like that, seems like a good argument to be made that it's both a monopoly and a utility.
Not sure how possible this will be with so much interplay between the DNC and Silicon Valley?
- WiFi network access (tightened up in recent mobile OS') which can give you a pretty accurate location
- Photo roll (think of all that EXIF location data if you're giving photo roll access to leave images for reviews)
- Calendar/location integration (who else is scheduled to go to that meeting on your calendar which you're directing yourself to via your maps app)
- Bluetooth for all the BTLE beacons you're walking past in stores etc which have been gifted them for free from tracking companies
I'm not taking a moral standpoint here on whether it's right to collect this data, just pointing out that there's an order of magnitude more than the article describes.
Are all those issues valid on an iPhone as well or does Apple limit it‘s privacy evading features?
Edit: Done. Deleted it.
Now if only I had an alternative to Garmin Connect. Love my fitness watch (Garmin Fenix), but hate the way they collect data about me. And no alternative.
Are you sure you're just not rationalizing Apples collection? It's kinda important to be realistic when it comes to privacy and not be mislead by loud marketing.
If they allow advertising based on constraints on that data, they are selling it, albeit indirectly.
The only data I know of that they sell directly is to NSA where they provide access to data and get money for it. They are largely compelled to do this though and I expect anyone in the US with data would be forced to as well.
Interestingly since google could deanonymize if they wanted, I wonder if nowadays NSA is just sucking in all our profiles from google and then deanonymizing to have de facto profiles on every human on the planet.
There's still the "Product Improvement > Routing and Traffic" toggle (enabled by default) but I'd be surprised if this isn't anonymized and/or scrubbed frequently.
Most of them are valid on iOS as well, however if you go to Settings > Google Maps > Location and pick “While Using the App”, Google will only be able to track your location while you have the application open, so they can’t track everywhere you go as described in #3.
And Mapy.cz is quite decent Maps replacement. Acctually better for outdoor activity like cycling and jogging.
You could just turn off location history in the settings.
So it’s like having pop up ads.
The limited functionality is also frustrating as you can’t even save locations with search history turned off.
Google Maps product designers don’t care about good UX, they care about collecting data from users. They explicitly design bad interfaces into their products to drive behavior.
It is still extreme power, like practical knowledge of nuclear fission.
Popular understanding of the greatest risk of holding such power is the movie “The Social Dilemma”, which is hardly the equivalent of “War Games”. It briefly hugs itself sharing a vision of a world where technology doesn’t collect and manipulate. In the history of the market, have we ever accomplished that?
We’re not on the sidelines. We continue to actively use hardware made by others on networks run by others to push more and more data to a plethora of centralized services, and even with P2P mesh networks that won’t stop. It’s Pandora’s Box. AI may end up killing or putting us in tubes like in The Matrix just to try to save us from ourselves.
But if we try to stop it or slow it, we risk not finding cures for disease, dying from an asteroid or rogue black hole, not seeing more wonders of the universe, or not experiencing the 2049 holo equivalent to Brittany Spears in Toxic.
Other than that, the article is one of the most clickbaity one I've read
Can always try to look for ways around first. Invidition (Firefox plugin to make use of Invidious automatically when seeing Youtube links) worked ok-ish for a while for me, lately less so.
I used google maps as a sort of address book starring the homes of friends, family, work locations, interesting places, etc. One day I turned off all the tracking and location history crap and had zero issues. Then one day I couldn't see any of my saved locations. What? I did some research and found out that a recent update now requires you to enable location history. WTF! Their brain damaged logic is the location you saved was done in the past so it stands to reason that it's part of history! Of course that's not really the reason, the reason is to force people to turn location history back on.
Bullet, meet foot.
This doesn't give anyone actual value, most of the things listed are common sense and if you use Google Maps, you are probably already aware of it. I'd wager that some people use Maps exactly because these features make it convenient.
Though as I live next door to a pub in my village it used to keep checking me in - google probably thinks I have a drinking problem :-)
I'd suspect mostly every human on earth is in some database somewhere, and that will become a normal facet of life. Even the second you're born a record is made, as well as the rough time of your death (I'd admit we can't exactly epoch that just yet, but maybe soon we'll have that level of accuracy).
Yup.
(Note: I went through an EU country in their region picker, went to sitemap and this is the URL I got).
Technology benefits do not have to come with this trade off. The article points to a number of ways it doesn’t like allowing offline access.
Right now, all iOS and Android phones assign you an id for advertisers. iOS is planning to get rid of this. So, while advertisers may not know (and really don't care about) your real name, they can build quite a profile of you.
In fact, if it helps the platform and allows for more relevant ads, I'm all for it.
Why else would a Nigerian prince be interested in you?
When they anonymize you, that just means they give you an is not linked to your phone number or account. It doesn’t mean someone can’t link it for you.
The best defense to this is to reset your ad id regularly. Or on iPhones, turn off ad personalization. I don’t know about Android.
Whats actually happening: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview
But what is the alternative?
Should the concerned government body take it up? Your government releases a Maps application and asks citizens to use that...People are still going to have privacy concerns with that!
Or we simply decide to wait for the next bus and not bother to know when it arrives. Go back to a laid back life? Many mortals think that is a good idea, and, that is OK.
Like it or not, privacy is a problem of our civilization. Privacy problems are not going to go away. It up to the kingdom of humanity to live in good faith...But I have faith we might figure this out one day. Just not today...
I'm one of those mortals; my data connection is disabled on the phone and used only for emergencies (last time I've used it was months ago).
Ultimately it fits in the big picture of the connected life. One can still live disconnected, and pay 10% of the "convenience price", but save 100% of the associated problems.
I don't blame the connected lifestyle but the more I think about it, the more it looks like an addiction to me, and the big companies are capitalizing on it. I don't agree with them, but I can hardly blame them - it takes one tap to switch the connection off.
A standard format for public transportation schedules exists, and many municipalities already provide that format to the public so that map-app developers can show public-transit details. So, people can find out when their next bus or train is going to arrive without giving up any of their own privacy.
I personally think it's great that I can lookup what I did two months ago thanks to Google services. I adblock and disable as much ad tracking as possible but I'm pretty happy with how useful google services are for my day to day errands. It reminds me of places I went two years ago that I couldn't remember without it.
I find it strange people complain about it, yet still use their services. That's hypocrisy right there as well as a deeply unsettling conflict within.
Everyone is entitled to make their choice of what phone they buy.
Trust me, I am aware of the conflict. I hate Google with a passion, yet I still use some of their services. I feel sick doing it, but sometimes the convenience is worth my nausea.
This contradiction is your problem, not Googles. They will continue to make money off you and me. The only difference is I don't get the nausea.
Until you show me something REALLY dodgy they're are doing, I'll keep using their services.
As I mentioned before, I'm aware they sell my behaviour as advertising data to companies. On my end I block as much advertising as possible so I find it's a useless strategy product teams pushing things onto me.
Technology is becoming more capital-intensive MUCH more rapidly than the total amount of capital in the economy is growing. As a result, the economy can support fewer and fewer choices as time goes on.
We're already at the point where there are only one-and-a-half companies selling LTE modem chips. All the good phones use Qualcomm's chips. The only other producer is Realtek, whose chips are only used in (AFAICT) extremely low-end phones sold only in developing countries. Qualcomm can backdoor your phone's modem chip with total impunity. Perhaps they already have.
I don't think it's useful for an arguments point of view to speculate that a chipset company has already built in backdoors to their products.
Breathing is a requirement for life. Owning an android phone isn't.