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Comment by supportengineer | Hacker News Reader

I will never forget what it was like to grow up in the 80s. As a child often I was at some kind of child care. After school programs, or a neighbors house. I remember what it was like, wanting my parents to pick me up. I lived in a place that was surrounded by bullies and abusive religious zealots. Often times I would be staring out the window or looking towards the road wondering when my loving parents would come and get me and take me away from the nightmare situation. Endless hours staring, wondering, hoping. Praying for them to pick me up and take me away.

And that is why I happily allow my wife and my children to track me at all times.

So they will never feel that kind of pain and despair that a young child once felt.

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Would your parents have picked you up if real time location sharing existed? I understand your story is emotional and personal, but using it as an argument why you want to share your location at all times is a bit of a non-sequitur.

It was more about not knowing where they were, or when they were coming. With technology, children can always know where their parents are, not to mention they are only one text or call away.

Why not only letting them track you when you're going to pick them up, or better when they ask you to?

In addition to the other arguments presented here, I have 24/7 location sharing enabled with my wife so that neither of us has to actively remember to check our phones all the time. And if it's potentially an emergency, it is still active if one of us is incapacitated.

Or.. just messaging when you're on your way?

And not leaving them in abusive situations?

I'm actually not opposed to direct location sharing among one's loved ones, but I don't think being in terrible situations and praying for your parents to remove you from them is a good argument in favour of location sharing.

i mean this is cute in an isolated incident, until, you know, all the corporations sell that info to a fascist government who uses it to track dissidents in Portalnd.

The fascist government won't need you to enable tracking, they can have the corporation that makes your OS silently gather it and give it to them, or simply have the phone carrier do it, again silently to the one carrying the device.

We're already all carrying a tracking device with us, willingly.

The government can also just set up their own cell tracking towers, cut out the middleman.

Or just mandate that the telcos do it and make it illegal to tell anyone about it.

why would they need to do that? that's just how cell towers work. the government can and does also buy the location data on the market like anyone else.

yeah, the important part is that the government via third party surveillance gets much of the domestic spying they need without "technically" breaking the law, even though if they directly did any of the activities they would be breaking the law.

And yet they do that all the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...

> i mean this is cute in an isolated incident, until, you know, all the corporations sell that info to a fascist government who uses it to track dissidents in Portalnd.

The phones (GPS) and cell networks (towers) have your location anyway. The article -- and what the parent comment was talking about -- is social location sharing.

Although citizen tracking is a valid concern, turning on "Find my Friends" isn't going to make you any more vulnerable.

IIRC some of the social location sharing options have sold data in the past, eg Life 360 (I think they still sell data but claim that they've started making it aggregated/anonymous)

I have location services off, so at least my phone doesn't usually have my location, and neither does Google.

That is wildly optimistic.

There are still various Google processes that likely still gather your location, and certainly your phone carrier does.

I don't think Google does if location services are off.

I wouldn't trust that. Google considered that an app-level setting previously, not a choice the user made to deny location data to Google. That kind of attitude is likely to have seeped into the organization, and "We know better" / "The user expects location to work for this even with GPS off" is quite likely still the prevailing attitude.

At the very least, trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. Google has lost my trust, and assumptions of good faith have evaporated.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/14/google-lo...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37523992

> turning on "Find my Friends" isn't going to make you any more vulnerable

There's definitely a huge difference between actively sending your location to a third party all the time and passive, often illegal data collection by the cell towers that can be stopped whenever you need by switching off the modem.

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