Comment by Location-Data | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Location-Data | Hacker News Reader

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I was reluctant to mention this kind of story in such a sweet context but a few comments have already touched on privacy, so I want to add my two cents.

At some point in the past I had the surreal experience of opening a news website and seeing a familiar face on the front page. Not a celebrity, rather a man whose face had been in some small subfolder of my brain for several years.

The man had been convicted of serial rape. He would drug victims and record them. He was known to be active within a certain time range from the timestamps of the videos. He repeated this dozens of times and was only caught after the final victim woke up during the act. Authorities appealed for people to come forward with any more information because they believed there could be more victims than were discovered from the videos.

By cross-referencing the location data from my phone with the date of an event my Last FM profile and the location of his home, I was able to confirm why he looked familiar. This allowed me to contact the authorities and bring the start of the known time frame significantly forward.

(there might be enough information in this post for the perpetrator to be identified - if you do, please keep it to yourself)

I took the pragmatic approach and said to myself "look, if Google really wants to know where I am the only way to avoid it is to go into the woods without my phone, so why not?"

Then one day the Toronto Transit Commission police thought I was re-using someone elses streetcar fare because of how old it was. I just prefer the streetcar to subways, so I took a longer route. As soon as I pulled out my phone with my location tracking they believed me. I didn't even have to resort to mentioning that I used to work for the TTC as a coop student.

I'm not saying I absolutely love all this surveillance-lite stuff, but in an honest breakdown of the tradeoffs for law abiding people living in real democracies or other trustworthy states I fail to see a huge downside at the present time.

I'm sure people have opposite stories where instead of a quick dismissal they received attitude, general harassment, or escalation.

Small "crimes" like stealing streetcar fare are sought out not because of the crime itself but because the more contact points people have with police the more people are arrested. There is probably an overlap of people who steal streetcar fare and people who are harboring small amounts of narcotics etc etc.

Just like in America we're pulled over on the road for the most benign things just so there's contact with the police, which leads to a higher rate of convictions.

I was doing self-checkout at Walmart and the dumb machine thought I stole something I had already scanned, lo and behold an officer appears out of the shadows with a general attitude at me as if I was trying to pull off the grand-heist of stealing GREEN ONIONS.

I personally think law-abiding people have a right to limited contact with police.

When I stopped driving in the United States, I noticed a sharp drop in interaction with the police. Years would go by with zero interaction. In a car: A few times a year (or month if unlucky). All of those automobile-related interactions are an opportunity for you to make a small mistake that will be blown up by the officer.

It seems like the US has a real problem with this.

I've been driving for almost 15 years in the UK, and I've only been stopped once by the Police at a heavily advertised drink-driving checkpost set up during the Christmas season.

I recall a road trip with my father (this is at least 30 years ago), where we went to see my grandfather a few states away. As we drove through some small rural town, we were tailed by the local police for quite some time until we hit the county line and they simply turned around -- my dad told me at the time that they must have been following us to see if they could find a reason to pull us over. As I grew up, and started driving myself, I believe that to have been the case. Quotas for tickets and arrests are definitely a problem in the US.

Real question / No trolling: How do you feel about "holiday season" motor car stops? On the surface, it sounds great (reduce drink-driving), until you are an ethnic minority and the police person is discriminatory. Thoughts?

Seems like another US-centric problem.

Discrimination does happen in the UK, but I don't think there's the same motivation from the Police to arrest people for trivial matters during this sort of campaign.

I disagree.

Certain systems are more efficient if they operate with high trust. The TTC is one of the places where we go with the more efficient option that allows defectors to gain at the cost of others. I actually know someone that is a communist and refuses to pay TTC fare on the basis that he thinks it should be completely socialized. He estimated that the one time he got a ticket paid for only 1/3rd or 1/5th of his total usage.

In other words, defectors are still net-ahead. The system is under-policed.

But the small amount of policing that exists exerts enough social pressure to stop widespread flouting of the rules. I was happy to provide proof that my very-soon-to-be-expiring transfer was from a valid trip.

I'm sorry that you've had a poor interaction with an officer, but I think it's partially a matter of how one treats officers. Even when I've been in the wrong, I did my best to treat them with respect and I quite honestly have been treated well by every police I've dealt with, save one exception when I was pulled over in America. I accept that this happens, and a curt reply and a stiff ticket is not the end of the world and I am happy to have largely lived and traveled in places where the police were civil.

Could it be perhaps because you are a white male, and look fit and straight? Just hypothesizing.

That's because you haven't been the victim of fabricated narratives supported by your tracked locations as data in order to imprison or blackmail you. This is just a rehashed "if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about".

Thank you to the other commenter for pointing out the banality of the "crime".

I didn't say nothing to worry about I said that, on balance, location tracking probably helps law abiding citizens more than it hurts them. It's an economic choice.

I am far less likely to initiate a serious crime in Canada than I am to be falsely accused of a serious crime. It is hard to fake exhaust data and saying "I saw him near the John St Starbucks at 9am with a gun" is fakeable just by following someone around. You don't need my Google data to prove it. It's on the CCTV cameras, it's on the cellphone towers my phone is pinging, etc.

I understand this makes people nervous, and I agree that there is something to be nervous about, but when I talk about the practical choice of recording your location data to a provider like Google I don't see much practical downside at the present time.

That's really making the assumption that this didn't happen before data tracking.....

And that argument is much, much older than the digital age. If anything, extra tracking helps exonerate more than without it (false imprisonment, etc) https://time.com/wrongly-convicted/

I don't see how historicity weakens the argument.

The reality is that data can be used to your benefit or against you. Having more of it doesn't shift the balance one way or another. It just means there's more opportunities to take it one way or the other.

Your times article also makes no mention of location tracking raising exoneration rates. It talks most prominently about how cheap faulty field drug tests contributed significantly to the improper convictions.

If you're innocent, more information about what happened is more likely to exonerate you than incriminate you. If you're guilty, the extra data is more likely to incriminate you.

Every extra data point is an opportunity for abuse, not exoneration.

When you are facing wrongful conviction, the assumption is that you are unable to present evidence in an effective manner anyway.

Thoughts on logging your own location with free software instead of Google doing it?

I'm assuming you mean local logging of your location, as opposed to burying it in a company's blackbox of a cloud. I think it's a far superior option from a privacy standpoint because you are in control of whether or not that information exists to the rest of the world. That is the critical differentiating factor.

I'm also assuming here that you are actively looking to have your location logged -- something most people do not explicitly sign up for before it starts happening for them (usually after it has manifested results, people accept it as some weird fact-of-life).

Got recommendation?

Hoping for one, ultimately. A starting point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30904003

That's cool, thanks

I turned my location history off when I saw this story https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...

headline: "Google tracked his bike ride past a burglarized home. That made him a suspect."

HN discussion about it (March 7, 2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22511637

I think it was Isaac Asimov who wrote an article once speculating on a future utopia where there would be total information freedom and transparency - everyone would know everything about everyone's movements. You could see why it would be appealing - how could there be crime if you knew where everyone was at all times? No body could cheat on their spouse, no child would ever go missing. Seems hopelessly naive now of course but you can see how it would work as a thought experiment. In reality there'll always be a protected class who get to hide their movements.

> No body could cheat on their spouse

Nobody could cheat secretly. They'd still cheat. The framing story in my favourite comic issue "Winter's Tale" has more or less exactly this be scenario, "I was going to tell you" he says. The people in Winter's Tale and most of that run (Gaiman's Golden Age of Miracleman) live in a utopia, but they're still people and they still cheat and lie. The larger point of the story is that children won't fill a hole in your heart.

Naive indeed; on the surface it sounds utopian. But who decides what a crime is? That's where it quickly flips over into becoming a dystopia. I mean, for example homosexuality is still a crime punishable by death in a lot of places; if you cannot hide that, then a lot of people would be picked up.

Your last point is exactly poignant; it'll be lawmakers who end up above the law, above the control. Which makes it more like 1984 than a "borg" utopia.

Your point boils down to privacy is good because it lets people get away with crime and laws might be bad.

The solution shouldn't be to make crimes easier to hide. It's to legalize homosexuality.

I do expect the Right to Privacy will be brought up again to the Supreme Court as a result of making use of location history sometime in the next five years.

Indeed, I believe the first use of the "Right to Privacy" was by a lawyer and Louis Brandeis, and future Supreme Court Justice, upset that a journalist had written that one of them attended a wedding.

Depending on who brings to suit, I expect it's likely that even the conservative justices will suddenly agree with a right to privacy.

Which world would you prefer? A world where not a single crime would go unpunshied, and hence serious crime would probably disappear forever, but with the risk of the Government or criminals (would they still exist??) abusing the data for their own advantage? Or a world as we have today where a lot of crime happens everywhere and where a criminal just needs to be smart enough to never get caught? I am not sure the answer is as straightforward as everyone seems to think here. I think I would be willing to at least run an experiment about this (perhaps China is already doing it).

Good points. Those who don't have their information exposed, are those with power. They know everything about you, but you know nothing about them, or even how much access to your life that they have.

The downside is, the government have 0 business knowing where I am, or where I go. I don't need to justify my right for privacy. And the argument of "if you are innocent, you have nothing to fear" is lame, and toxic, that is like saying, you don't drive that much, is ok to force you to take the bus.

That's awful. I'm sorry that happened to you.

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