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Comment by seba_dos1 | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: whatever you can do with this data, Google can do as well!

Hey wait a second, that's not fun at all, that's incredibly depressing!

On a serious note, it does remind me of that time police arrested a man on suspicion of a break-in, because he was riding his bike in the neighborhood at the time and Google recorded it.

We get it, Google has access to the data you share with them, shocking.

The interesting aspect of that, is what Google and other authorities do with such data. They can be unlocking all sorts of private trivia, unbeknown to any of the users involved, to an extent far beyond any are suspecting.

That could include such authorities, manipulating or interfering with events and lives, more than anybody would think possible or should be legally allowed.

> manipulating or interfering with events

What might be a good example?

Just for clarity, there was a "could" in there, in the context of what I stated.

Google and other authorities having such access to so much data about individuals, means they can know of relationships, that the interacting individual parties involved don't know about each other. So, if a wife were cheating on her husband, that can be known. A line can be crossed, where information is leaked to the husband, in various ways. This of course is just a "theoretical" example, of many other kinds of possibilities.

Access to private and personal information is its own kind of power, that can be easily abused under many gray areas, and under all kinds of pretexts and weak justifications.

Also to the data you opt out of sharing but they ignore it and share it anyways.

And you telecom provider had been able to do that for decades.

Nowhere near this level of detail. Telecoms providers (until "hyperlocal" 5G base stations become commonplace) have very coarse location info compared to GPS (as well as other sources a typical smartphone uses such as Wi-Fi triangulation). Even with 5G, smartphone-determined location data is likely to still be much more accurate.

They have the data, but they make sure to not show that they have the data, because they are very aware of how creepy it would be. They spent a lot of time on optics.

Do people who see ads get ads based on where they've been by the way?

In fact, they can do a lot more since they have data on more than two people.

They know when your sleeping, they know when your awake. They know when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!

Seriously, they know every time you pick up your phone. Where you shop, how much you spend, if you miss a stop in the highway, if you text your parents happy birthday, if your heart rate increases when you’re around a particular phone. They quite literally may know your gay before you do.

What is their current definition of "be good" so that I can comply? Is there any changelog? Perhaps some future plan introducing new parts of "good" and deprecating some as well?

I'm sure they most cherish people who criticize Google.

If Google built such a product, you'd probably find it on their graveyard. So it's best to be careful and not antagonize them; because always remember: You only have one digital life, so keep your head down and don't blow it.

I wish that was pure /s, but the amount of "Ask HN: Google banned me or my business for no obvious reason" is really staggering. (n.b.: Of course I'm talking about the old Google of 2022, not about the glorious overlords that Google since has become; all praises the holy trinity of Android, Google Search and Google Glurp for Glorps! Please don't ban me.)

Funny nobody can even tell why they ban somebody because ML just won't tell them why. "Hey, our ML_ANOMALY_20220430_6C2DBE3AFC model ensemble has told us to ban you, so we are banning you! There is no recourse (unless you have friends at Google). Please don't contact us ever again. We will ban all the people from the whole block around you as well."

Yeah. Due to this topic I actually thought "oh, good idea, I should automatically download my whole Google data once every month; better safe than sorry". Then I realized that this might get me banned, because actual bad actors probably do that as well.

Yeah, you'd be a glaring anomaly. Strive for the mean!

While she likely got permission, having your girlfriend request all your location data is a bit like Zuckerberg requeating all your location data.

On some level alarm bells are going off.

Is it? My girlfriend is probably the only person I'd be comfortable with sharing my location data with, given a reasonable purpose (the one in this post would be good).

Your girlfriend won't resell it or share it with insurance or government agencies as easily.

A girlfriend may not be as trustworthy, as some people seem to think or at least no more than what is selfishly beneficial and to her advantage. Lots of guys find this out, way too late.

This depends a lot on your SO and your relationship to her/him/them. Given exactly the pretext from the blog post: I can easily think of a past relationship where I'd totally agree with you (very distrustful person who could not have resisted the urge to maliciously interpreted the data), and another relationship where I'd be totally cool with it (except I wouldn't want the heat map to be public). For most of my past relationships (and my current, final relationship) however such a request is unrealistic anyway; they simply don't have the technical ability to do such an analysis.

Google literally did this during the pandemic

https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/

So did apple:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/04/apple-makes-mobility-...

Only… they gave that information to government (supposedly post-analysis and anonymized). Regardless the data was quite literally used to “track and trace” then as a mechanism / justification to place you under house arrest.

Ehh, there was some really sketch things there. I think at least for apple they might have potentially already built it and this just moved their announcement date up. There’s a very weird simultaneously timed NSA bill in congress at the same time.

/tinfoilhat

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