Google moves to end geofence warrants | Hacker News Reader

Google moves to end geofence warrants

techcrunch.com

40 pointsmikece15 comments

Related big thread yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660646

forcing government entities to find the individual, get probable cause, and get a warrant for that individual’s possessions is actually the least controversial idea there is

I'm way less comfortable with the idea that google gets to decide who sees this data than my government. The right that google is asserting here is the right to sell this data or use it for its own benefit, not the right to keep it private.

No they are modifying the way it’s collected so that it stays local and they don’t have it at that level of detail.

It’s not an either or. If google has it than the government has it too.

It’s the “least controversial idea” if you have faith in the government to do the right thing. Many people don’t, for one reason or another. Fortunately, more people (and companies) are realizing that liabilities like this can be absolved by simply not having the data, or access to the data, in the first place. This involves storing data locally on client when possible, using end to end encryption when possible, encryption by default (the default on latest HTTP, DNS, etc), and simply not holding sensitive data in the first place. There’s still work to do, but we are moving in the right direction.

I think this comment and a sister comment misread what I was intending

I’m saying that instead of the government going to intermediaries like google for their fishing expeditions, they have to go to the individual themselves and do an old fashioned actual investigation

as in, we’re agreeing

If the big tech companies hadn't made surveillance and ads as the defacto business model, letting users own and keep their data would have been the natural evolution from desktop computing to mobile computing. Instead we are stuck with this toxic environment of giving out software for "free" in order to establish a monopoly and then squeezing data out of users.

>letting users own and keep their data would have been the natural evolution from desktop computing to mobile computing

This simply isn't true. Bias disclaimer, most of my salary is paid by ads.

Is there a lot of money to be made selling data? Sure.

But most of the scenarios of value to customers involve sharing data.

It is crucial to me that my photos are backed up automatically in case I lose my device. It is very convenient and nice that those photos have metadata such that I can search "Berlin" and find photos taken when I'm in Berlin.

It is convenient for me to have one search bar where I can search for "Thai food" and find it near me without having to go into a mapping app and do the search from there (which would also need to reach out to the internet with a query about my current location).

There are societal problems from big data, but the concept of "free" is only one reason we ended up here - data enables a huge number of scenarios which deliver real customer value and which people want.

Both of your examples don't necessarily require me to share my data completely with a third party. One could host all of that at home without much computing power.

However I don't think it's entirely just platforms only selling that. Instead I think most consumers don't want to have to host the app at home, they don't want to configure and manage anything they just want to install an app or go to a webpage and have it work and scale.

Data could be encrypted (on the cloud, with backups and all) and the software could be given permission to just access the data it needs, do the computation and then discard the data. To clear, these are hard problems to solve, which could be solved if there is a market for them. But the big tech companies have made it prohibitively expensive to carve out any market for software that respects the user.

You can't start a business saying "let us have a fair exchange of money for services provided". Some other surveillance company would undercut you by providing the same service for "free". Even if you did establish a viable payment based business (like whatsapp), some big tech company will buy you out and turn it into a surveillance product.

Residential telephone service doesn’t have ads but the government scooped up the metadata of who you’re calling and who called you just the same.

As if this even matters? If you've got a cell phone turned on, it's registered with a tower. Police can still get your location history via tower pings from the cellular providers. I think it sucks that Google is discontinuing this service, because I like being able to go back and see when I was at a particular place. So the police can still do this, but once Google turns off timeline, I can't any longer.

You can download an app that does the same thing.

Much less precise

Your comment is unclear, but if you're trying to say that phone location is less precise when determined by a tower (or a set of them), you're correct unless the phone can reach three or more towers, and they do TOA triangulation (which they do).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com