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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

It seems like a privacy respecting app shouldn't leave your privacy dependent on the ongoing and unwavering benevolence of the developer or the services their app uses. For a weather app that would mean not sending my location data anywhere, but also not sending the locations I want the weather for anywhere either since if you know that most of the time you'll be able to tell where I am or where I will be.

The ideal privacy respecting weather app would download and update a local copy of every location's weather, and any requests you made would never leave your own device. I'm not sure how realistic that is, but as long you trust the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the government they operate under, and that the data being sent to OpenWeather is non-identifying or that they too can be trusted with your data, then this is probably the closest we're going to get.

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I really like this climate of extreme digital paranoia we've been made to live in :)

But I really think that you can trust an app made by a German university not to sell your data. Not so sure about US universities though.

> The ideal privacy respecting weather app would download and update a local copy of every location's weather,

You can also do it with multiple, independently operated servers, as long as they don't collude with each other beyond a given threshold. Then the queries and responses can be kept small. The private info in the queries is split between the servers, and the responses are recombined, using methods inspired by Shamir secret sharing in cryptography. That prevents the servers from learning the actual queries being made or responses being sent.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_information_retrieval#...

What I do is to not install apps which don't work with disabled Location (yes, there are stuypid apps like that not allowing to select location manually, even better are those which don't allow selecting location without gapps in phone), simple as that.

I have no problem manually enter my location once in a few months (or more likely once and for good for home address and 1-2x per year for vacation location).

> For a weather app that would mean not sending my location data anywhere, but also not sending the locations I want the weather for anywhere either since if you know that most of the time you'll be able to tell where I am or where I will be.

This doesn't even make sense. How do you want a weather app to not send "locations you want the weather for"?

Also, updating a local copy of every weather place on the planet doesn't scale at all. There's so many places that it won't fit on a single device.

Or, you could use cryptography.

> Or, you could use cryptography.

Even if the traffic is encrypted if a remote server has to understand what location you're requesting data for, find that data for you, and then deliver it back to you, that same server will be able to log that and you're back to having to trust that they won't save and abuse that data.

You could request with something like tor and randomize the times data is requested to avoid your location history leaking.

With homomorphic encryption, you could serve data in a scenario like this without revealing information about the user location to the server.

An example which allows you to read Wikipedia articles from the server, without the server knowing which article you are requesting, exists here: https://spiralwiki.com/

I don't think something like this is in regular use yet, but it could become an interesting solution to reduce leaking user information.

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