"I'm not based in [your city], I just change the location to talk to new people". It's frequent enough that I stopped using the app altogether. OKC was already going downhill well before this.
It takes a few seconds and they are really upfront about it. I can imagine OkCupid charging for such a filtering feature, but I've never paid for it just didn't seem "worth it". Especially since Match.com owns it, and I'm not really helping the underdog.
( I understand that I might not have been making a sensible economical decision, as I have many examples of not doing that in the past )
I've seen some fun papers of "Well, you could do this awful thing..." (comparison of accelerometer data to deconflict which nearby phones are in the same vehicle vs separate ones to better refine social graphs), in addition to all the stuff we know is being done (ultrasonic signals in various ads, tracking shoppers by their wifi/bt beacon MACs, etc). I assume the state of what's actually being done is far worse than what's in the papers, because someone, somewhere, though they could get a signal out of something.
Trying to "de-evil" this sort of system is, first and foremost, fiddling around the edges of what's possible (I expect various people are reading and thinking, "Oh, you think spoofing GPS will matter, cute!), but it's also remaining in the ecosystem that has, repeatedly, demonstrated that they're going to get their paws on everything they think they can justify, and then expand that over time.
There's no reason that a TV needs to be doing automatic content recognition on various inputs, but they're all doing it these days.
I've given up and I no longer carry a smartphone. I'd encourage those who can get away with it to do the same thing. You can't go hoovering up all my data from a dumber KaiOS device because it doesn't run all the apps, and if a company makes their desktop/laptop interface so painful to use to drive people to the phone interface, well, they're probably doing things I don't want to support anymore.
Trying to "reduce the harm" of smartphones, more and more, feels like trying to figure out how to mitigate the impact of a world class meth addiction by focusing on the symptoms - "Oh, you need to hydrate better!" "Here's some skin moisturizer and a toothbrush!" and so on - without ever stating that the problem is the meth and that you need to stop using that, not try to figure out how to avoid losing your teeth while doing it.
He says whilst posting from his phone …
Part of my reason for not carrying a smartphone anymore is to be a better example to my kids, and I certainly point out couples staring at his-n-hers smartphones at a restaurant instead of actually enjoying each other's company.
Odds are good that instead of a smartphone, my daughter will just end up with her HAM license and a VHF handset instead. It'll cover the common cases direct simplex if I put a base station on the house, and my wife isn't opposed to getting her license either. :)
I think a comparison that does it more justice is to the use of leaded gasoline and its downstream effects on crime rates.
Seeing that someone is 100 ft away is a common start of a conversation. Maybe they live in the same apartment, at a local coffee shop, work in the same building. Which leads to... well...
That doesn't excuse the privacy issues though.
The types of people that open with "I'm 50m away from you" are super freaking creepy.
I use it with microg myself but I have to use a special fork. I wish microg had this option too, it would be great to be able to feed garbage.
Pretty sure SafetyNet, or something like it, from Google will also tattle on you if you spoof your location in apps that don't want you using mock locations, preventing you from using mock locations at all with apps.
down-low, we have an emergency
Handovers can be signalled by the network or the handset, but they use the received signal quality and strength (and handsets can send their signal quality and strength to the network to facilitate better handover scheduling) to arrange handovers.
You can also triangulate devices effectively using just the cellular signal to them, if you are the mobile network operator, using signal strength, or other techniques like time difference of arrival, if you have good clock sync across your base stations.