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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

Conceptually a feature similar to Recall doesn't have to involve sending any data to third parties. It should not need to be a service just a piece of software running locally, doing OCR and full text search indexing using local compute.

Incidentally I often tell my friends I run an app on my phone that captures my location 24/7 and they would initially sound horrified. But then I tell them all my location data is not sent to anywhere on the Internet, and ask them specifically what is horrifying about it. There is none.

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> I often tell my friends I run an app on my phone that captures my location 24/7 [...] But then I tell them all my location data is not sent to anywhere on the Internet

Your phone is on the Internet.

It takes only one attack (for instance, someone sends you an image which exploits an RCE on the image decoder and then chains into a privilege escalation exploit), or a careless mistake (like marking the wrong folder to be synchronized), or even an automatic update of the app (which adds a helpful "sync across your devices through the cloud" feature or similar), to have all that saved location data copied elsewhere.

You can't leak what you don't have; if you never saved your location history, there's no risk of it being leaked after the fact.

>if you never saved your location history, there's no risk of it being leaked after the fact

Very Buddhist in principle. I still prefer having my GPX tracks though, because they're useful to me, as well as notes, journals, logs... Local security is a separate question, and it's light years apart from stuff like Recall.

You wouldn't rather have only some of your location recorded? I don't understand the appeal of saving all data all the time.

It's akin to going to a concert and recording the whole thing, versus recording a small bit that feels memorable, so you can enjoy the rest of the experience fully present.

as a total aside, how do you know what they're going to pay at the concert before they start playing and you know it's your favorite song? Wouldn't you miss the beginning of the song?

It's a good total aside, my analogy was not great.

I went on Sunday, and she announced what she was playing. Otherwise from the initial notes it's easy to spot what's coming. Of course you end up with an imperfect recording, but it's good enough for the memories, I guess.

(I actually wanted to record the 10-minute jam session via Apple's Voice Memos but didn't notice it wasn't recording, because there's no feedback to when you press the button, and red-on-dark is easy to miss.)

Wasn't there a HN post a few weeks ago, describing how your phone's location can be tracked without anything installed and without leaving any trace on your phone? I think it was an exploit of CSS7 protocol used by networks?

> You can't leak what you don't have

Your mobile provider has your location history

The problem is that the data has to go somewhere. If you don't have the compute power locally, you have to send it to a server you control. At a point, this starts to break down because your attention to detail isn't sufficient to protect other operators. I think there are some happier mediums, but I wouldn't be as strident as saying there is no risk even if this is stored locally.

“I store all my location data and I see no problem because it's stored locally” is the new “I store all my passwords on a post-it and I see no problem about it”.

The more you store, the higher the risk, simple as that.

> The more you store, the higher the risk

You have a convincing argument for not taking photos and not writing notes down. In fact, why write anything down? Remember everything like Socrates asked people to.

“Don't write sensitive info on paper” and “don't take pictures of your genitals” used to be common advice actually.

What location-tracking app do you use? How does it impact the battery life? That sounds useful.

I use Arc which I've recommended on HN a few times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38662095 As a power user I find that it could be buggy but the developer behind it responds quickly on the forum. The developer also made another app with fewer features but FOSS: https://github.com/sobri909/ArcMini and it's been on my TODO list to use that as the basis to create my own location tracking app (I have some UI ideas for such an app in my mind).

The battery life impact is quite large. The iOS battery tool reports on the order of 5% to 10% but I think subjectively it feels much more than that. Getting GPS signals itself is IMO a bigger power draw than the app writing some time series data into a SQLite database (it defers expensive processing until the app enters the foreground).

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