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Comment by jonas21 | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure they're not doing this to get approximate location for use with A-GPS? Sure, GPS will work without it, but your time to first fix is going to be much longer, and your phone will have no idea where you are while you're waiting for that fix.

There's a good overview of A-GPS in module 5 here [1]. This is just how people expect GPS to work on modern mobile phones, to the point where they'd probably consider it a bug if they had to wait a while to get a fix.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CBINyC3NWU&list=PLGvhNIiu1u...

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I think cold start times on modern GPS units are on the order of 30 seconds now. Even if you lose all almanac and ephemeris data, and don't know what time it is. AGPS is nice (2s cold start times), but by no means essential for a decent user experience.

(The datasheets are not a lie. I have had a ZED-F9P on the shelf for a month or so. Plugged it in and had a fix in 32 seconds. The delay was that I could only see 3 GPS satellites, so had to fall back to the slightly slower multi-constellation warm start.)

that most definitely is the reason to ask for wifi scanning, but the point was reiterated many times in the post. This is about privacy AND the fact that GPS-only navigation works globally just fine. If the user wishes to have that improved cold start approximate location then sure, turn on wifi scanning. If they do not wish to give that up, they should still be able to navigate

So if an app knows your exact lat long after 30s of spending battery power there's no privacy issue but if it uses wifi SSIDs around you to do the job in 2s with less power it's a breach of privacy?

Why not let the user decide what their personal privacy trade-off is?

That is, fundamentally, what the original post is about.

Because it adds to the software complexity. several boolean toggles for deciding what to incorporate into the localization algorithm: one toggle for GPS, another for wifi, Bluetooth, cell tower, barometer, etc. and fusing these in all the various combination, testing them, etc.

and after doing all that users will mess up their config and then complain that this app sucks not knowing someone on HN had this feature request for "privacy" reasons even though it's pretty unclear to me what privacy is being gained here.

Apple products generally don't give the user much choice and decide what's right for the UX and it's served them well

Though the software complexity was already there, and they decided to remove it (by adding another kind of software complexity), effectively deleting a feature that apparently people are using.

It cannot even be claimed to be an UX improvement since it's creating disruption for everybody that had this feature disabled.

At this point they should have added it to the terms of use and deleted the toggle directly (which I suspect they are going to do down the line, when they can prove that nobody keeps that toggle off).

Sorry, that argument doesn't hold water. The software has to work in the park with no wifi too.

you misunderstand completely. sending a complete list of SSIDs from your surrounding perfectly tied to an exact GPS location gets you a map of the world and precise-enough location based solely off of SSID data. They are having customers build their database to track you later when you use any G-app that has wifi access but not gps access, they would then know your approximate location while reading emails.

I thought AGPS was just the download of almanac/ephemeris data from a server on the internet. I didn't think it had anything to do with figuring out location using visible wifi APs or anything like that. Sure, you need an internet connection to download the AGPS data, but that could also be your cellular data connection and not wifi.

AGPS works with cellular, Wi-Fi is not required. So no, it’s not only for this reason.

As I understand it, the OP is trying to keep all non-GPS location sources disabled.

> I've had different things disabled. Wifi scanning. Bluetooth. Cell location data. Etc. Always with one single goal -- GPS only for location.

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