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Comment by alisonkisk | Hacker News Reader

Is it an intrusion when Google/Android does the same thing when you access their servers?

The difference is you usually don't directly access their servers. You just walk in to a store and your phone grabs your location, sends it to google and then asks if you want to leave a review of the store.

You turned on location services.

I should not have to choose between giving Google a free for all access to my location data or having no location functionality on my device.

This is one of the primary reasons I won't use Android. They always bundle critical features in with privacy violations.

> I should not have to choose between giving Google a free for all access to my location data or having no location functionality on my device.

Location indoors is made possible by sending a list of visible WiFi AP MAC addresses and relative signal strengths to a web service. WiFi MAC addresses are globally unique serial numbers, and Google/Apple maintain huge MAC-to-location databases. Enabling location doesn't just turn on GPS, it sends your location to Apple/Google constantly to retrieve the lat/lon from visible WiFi triangulation.

The only way to keep your mobile location halfway private (your carrier still gets it, and leaks it to your national military) is to keep all location services disabled on the device. Otherwise, simply enabling location access at all gives Google and Apple the aforementioned "free for all access".

I agree that it shouldn't be this way, but it is today.

It used to be much easier for Android users to be able to choose which location service they wanted to use, for example Mozilla’s location service downloaded from F-Droid. However, Google made a change to AOSP that requires third-party location services to now be installed as a system app, not a regular app. (Only a tiny amount of people will have the skills to use the Android shell to move the package to the right place.) It is hard to not see this as a way for Google to lock Android users into using only its service and giving it all their location data.

As sibling comment wrote, the "do you want to review $location?" prompts come from you enabling location history, which is a Maps feature they offer to users who want to keep track where they've been.

You can enable location services (needed for apps like Maps, Lyft, Tinder, Find My Device) without enabling location history. Whether they still record your history, who knows.

If you turn off location history, you shouldn't get the notifications to review stores and the like, IME. I've had location history off but location services on (damn you, uber!) for ages, and I don't get those any more.

They still lock features out if you do. You can't set your home location in google maps unless you allow them to track and store your location 24/7. Meanwhile ios manages perfectly fine keeping that data on your phones local storage.

A company selling a product to a few isn’t an issue, yet one who controls the market is. It’s all about the scale

These students have paid a non-trivial amount of money to attend this school, and passed up the chance to attend others. They are a market that Brown has almost complete control over.

What meaningful choice could a student make to avoid being tracked in the login they use to take classes is what tracks them?

What company? It an issue if Google runs ads against your location history and lets you delete it whenever you request, but not an issue that Flashlight App sells your permanent location history forever to brokers to aggregate and resell to anyone who asks for it?

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