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Comment by 2020aj | Hacker News Reader

2020aj

I actually love location history. Makes it easy to answer questions like: "what was the name of that great restaurant in Edinburgh when I visited 4 years ago?"

Edit: but I do agree it should be opt-in

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I have nothing against tracking your own location and keeping records of it yourself; but it's an entirely different thing when a company which arguably has more power than the governments of multiple countries does it by default and keeps the records on its servers.

> does it by default

Yet the Google blog post says

> Location History is a Google account setting that is off by default

See https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/protecting-pe...

FWIW I checked my own Google account. It was not enabled. And I have no recollection or plan to ever enable it.

It's saddening to see HN users (among all people) peddling falsehoods like this.

> Location History is a Google account setting that is off by default

Android still by default "shares" location with Google. That setting is merely to turn off storing that data on Google's side. Unless they get a warrant compelling them to keep it. And unless they are lying, again:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-admits-tracking-users-l...

Someone really ought to sue Google so that during discovery Google will be compelled to speak the truth. The amount of confusion in this issue is immense. And tech publications like ZDNet is part of the problem. Conflating concepts like tracking vs collecting, not to mention the distinction between anonymous, pseudonymous, and tied-to-account tracking. In this particular article the title "tracking" clearly doesn't match the article's content where the Google spokesperson says "so that data was immediately discarded". Is Google lying about this? I think only a legal discovery will find out.

This has already happened, and entered some glorious emails into the public record, like Google engineers stating they'd find their location history settings confusing, despite being basically an expert in the field.

That isn't how lawsuits and discovery works. You can't just sue someone to go on a rogue fact-finding mission.

Apple still creates a relational database of iPhone user location by default too, I don't think this is a terribly surprising practice. I don't like either company doing it, but something tells me that they don't have a choice.

Apple Maps is intentionally designed not to associate any data with Apple IDs, and to use random ethereal identifiers for parts of the route.

So... source?

Find My is enabled by default on pretty much all Apple devices, no?

I think it asks if you want to turn it on during the set up flow, but I don't remember. I know it's off on mine, I suppose if you want to use Find My they have to have your location, since that's it's purpose.

Apple's Find My page seems to indicate it's end to end encrypted in many purposes, but lists all the ways it has to reveal your location to Apple to provide the feature.

End-to-end encryption doesn't do much good when Apple (and by extension, the NSA) is on the other end. It's the same deal as Google, with different set dressing.

This was changed in 2020; they used to keep it by default.

I have not looked at this for a while, but Google used to tie location search history which is valuable to users with location collection which is mostly valuable to Google. There is probably a perfectly good engineering explanation why, but it's hard to unsee abuse of market domination to track location data angle.

Google's reputation on such things is far from spotless. That's not HN's fault.

Several solutions to track your location on your device and on your private cloud exist. I use a Nextcloud add on. Nobody but me knows where I went.

nextcloud is sort of complex to manage, no?

Maybe it was at one time, but it is very easy nowadays. It can be setup in many ways. https://growyourown.services/beginners-guide-to-nextcloud/ Mine runs on a Raspberry PI with many services on the yunohost.org platform. I love it.

I've used it to geofence my employer and automatically fill out timesheets.

This is sort of the problem - it's too damn seductive.

That is a very emotional argument --but I accept that you could opt in to it. On the other hand, you might instead discover a new or different restaurant experience you would not have otherwise. Which, of course, could be better or worse.

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