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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Simple example, at least in Google Maps on Android. They have some sort of activity tracking.

If you enable that, you can save locations, so that, for example, you can "favorite" your home and your office for easy access.

If you disable activity tracking, you can't save anything.

Those two are totally unrelated, and you're still using Google Maps through your Google account, so there are 0 technical reasons they couldn't just persist your saved locations in the Google Cloud.

They just don't do it to force you to let them track your location.

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> They just don't do it to force you to let them track your location.

The final straw for me was when I disabled location services for Google Play Services[1] and the Gmail app, of all things, started nagging me about Google Play Services not having location data. Every time I opened it. Why the fuck does a mail client need location data so badly it has to nag you on every startup?

Oh wait, it doesn't. It's just their most popular app and so the premier spot for a nag screen.

My life's been de-Googled (apart from the odd video on YouTube) since the start of 2018 and my skin feels so much less crawly.

[1] You know, after they pushed all app developers to stop using the GPS APIs and instead get location through Google Play Services, so that you had to 'consent' to Google Play Services getting your location data if you wanted ANYTHING to be able to use location data?

Even opting out in Play Services would not be enough. Because Google tracks SSIDs, your smartphone location can get scooped up if you enable the hotspot feature. You'd have to rename your smartphone in order to opt out.

They do this for every google app on the phone: phone app, messages app, contacts app, chrome etc. They just want your data.

https://wego.here.com/ is a million times better. Because it's not Google, it's free, it's very good, and it doesn't report your location to Google.

I have no skin in this game - I have however been a very satisfied https://wego.here.com/ user since they were Nokia Maps back in 2012.

I clicked the link and was immediately prompted to grant location sharing permissions on my android phone.

It can't exactly do its job without location.

If you just want to look at the map you can say no.

Massive fan of WeGo but it just told me to take the U2 from Kurfürstenstr. U. Bahn Kurfürstenstr. is U1 and U3...

For car navigation it is quite good. For public transport i suggest you use local apps ( from the local public transport) company.

To me the most infuriating practice is that if you don't enable your location when you open google maps they will passive aggressively position your view at the most inconvenient place possibly, some times in the middle of the atlantic, as if they can't tell which city you are in.

Personally I consider that an odd form of "politeness". It is 'creepy' when you buy a large ticket item and ad networks try to seranade you with a demand you already fuffilled. They can geolocate by IP but instead choose to "look away". I guess they do that because those who aren't familiar with it would be freaked out at how close it got. Geo-IP is mostly just hilarious to me from how they get it off like when loging in to gmail in Pennsylvania saying there was a login attempt from Washington DC.

It shows some respect that you don't want focus on your actual geography but I also do stuff like look at real life places to see how well it matched with my initial imagination.

Ah, yeah. My US ISP had apparently bought a block of IPv4s from a Canadian ISP. aI kept getting redirected to Canadian checkout paths, French language pages, etc, for quite some time.

The large Canadian Telcos (until maybe in the near future) are actually regulated quite heavily to provide sub-services at competitive rates to competitors along their vertical integration. So you can spin up an ISP in Canada, buy capacity off Telus, and provide a decently priced competing product assuming you can undercut their overhead & admin costs.

Except for IP, which IME is usually ludicrously inaccurate for mobile networks (AT&T’s Sacramento network used to show up, IIRC, as being somewhere in the South Bay in IP-based lookups), doesn't disabling location services disable exactly the facilities they would use to determine what city you are in?

This change was actually what got me to switch back to iOS from Android. Google can fuck right off with that bullshit

I have all google maps tracking "turned off" in my google settings console and it still allows you to save locations manually.

Yeah, in lists. But there are 2 easy access locations, named "Home", "Work". Try setting those.

The ones you mention are put in lists and you have to navigate to them, about 3 screens.

There's no technical reason why the highest UI real-estate values "Home" and "Work" couldn't be saved independently of the ad settings.

Strange I have activity tracking disabled and can’t still search Home and work to find those respectively.

Are you saying that you can search for those and that was a typo ("can't" instead of "can")?

I just opened up Google Maps on my Android 10 device with activity tracking off. They've changed the UI, now it's sneakier. I can set them and there's a faint gray text underneath that says, and I quote:

"Personal places will be used across Google products, for personalized recommendations, and for more useful ads."

Dark Pattern to the ten thousandth power.

They're literally turning my input of my home and work address as an implicit consent to enable activity tracking (!!!)

Again, there are absolutely 0 technical reasons why the two have to be related. Software of all kinds from the beginning of time has had "saved"/"favorite"/"starred" functionality, without ad tracking related to it.

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