So can Google.
I'd love to have these features but the price is just too high. The price would be too high even if I trusted Google (which I don't), because every company that collects personal information will be hacked because no company is properly incentivised to protect users' data.
The only way to opt out is to turn your phone off (equivalently, leave it at home).
For some people, the fact that google also knows it is no big deal. For some it is. But if you are worried about your whereabouts being leaked, how can you justify using a phone in the first place? Verizon and AT&T are more likely to get hacked than google (or just sell that info outright, which they have done wholesale before)
If someone chooses to be privacy focused, then they will likely opt out of the things that they can control - that doesn’t change because there are others they can’t.
At this point, location tracking by companies is about as “voluntary” as using the web itself.
Or about as voluntary as actions which are performed with a pistol to one’s head.
Not really. Tower triangulation is nowhere close to as accurate. It places you in the general agea with a pretty large error bound. Leaking Behavioural details require fine grained location.
Privacy fatalism helps no one. Demanding that someone who is concerned about their privacy to “justify” their situation — one which they have no practical way of opting out of - is victim blaming.
Some people don’t want to be tracked. Any steps they take to reach that state are valid. Absolute privacy is impossible in this dystopia we now inhabit —- much of which has been built by the people who frequent this board —- but these doesn’t make Google’s absolutely trash privacy practices any less egregious.
Just because one industry has access to my location data without me being able to stop it, doesn't mean I'm going to give any other company that wants it unfettered access to my location data for whatever purpose they want.
With maps the good news is I do have an opportunity to pick providers that have better privacy policies.
I know you're speaking in broader terms, but for anyone interested you can have this specific feature (location history) using owntracks and owntracks recorder completely privately.
Certainly, some people will want to minimize the number of parties that know you were in location X at time Y. But I’d guess that for many people, myself included, that data simply isn’t that sensitive or interesting.
[1] All the major U.S. carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile) have been fined for reselling users’ location data without consent: https://www.govtech.com/network/wireless-carriers-face-200m-...
More interestingly so can anyone who can get a subpoena or some equivalent judicial order issued to have Google release your location to them.