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Comment by sega_sai | Hacker News Reader

From the article: "Google says it stopped responding to geofence warrants last year, because the company no longer stores such data and instead keeps location data on each user’s device. But law enforcement has made geofence requests of other tech companies, including Apple, Lyft, Snapchat, Uber, Microsoft and Yahoo"

That explains the changes Google did to the Timeline and why you can't see it in the browser anymore. That is great from them actually.

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Google got caught in the aftermath of the Carpenter vs. US ruling. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/google-disrupts-geofence...

By stopping that one specific way they supported warrantless surveillance, Google probably managed to make the current round of litigation moot so that Google won't suffer a negative ruling on the merits. They can start all over again in a slightly different way once the attention goes down a bit.

I think the trigger was this: https://www.axios.com/2022/07/01/google-delete-location-hist...

Correct.

Google moved to finally address this after the press started focusing on how hording location data could put women who visited reproductive healthcare clinics in legal jeopardy.

> Privacy advocates fear Google will be used to prosecute abortion seekers

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/11/1110391316/google-data-aborti...

Google never gets credit for shit like this, or their results in zero-knowledge maths and implementations, which are genuine public service beyond immediate productization.

From a factual standpoint it's good to acknowledge that pro-privacy work. From a standpoint of overall evaluating the actions, goals, incentives, and impacts of the company, they mean basically nothing. They are a surveillance advertising company, they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.

No - they are an advertising company. It is to their advantage to be ahead of the game with something like federated ML if that is where society is headed. To say Google has no positive impact is absurd - engineers there generally care about protecting user data. There is probably better access controls at Google than anywhere else. Sure there are pressures like you said but a gross misplace of user trust is what would destroy them.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

they kind of made the game, they are hardly victims here. I shouldn't have to be in a position to decide whether I trust them with a profile of all of my history and activities, especially when I never had an option to opt out, much less opt in.

I am probably far more sympathetic than you can ever imagine but the antecedents are not really unique to google. The technical destination of targeting advertising just looks like this given privacy laws (well the lack thereof).

See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/eff-congress-heres-wha... or probably any recent publication about privacy rights by the eff.

Like I get it but be mad that congress is a bunch of goofy old people who give zero shits. If you can point at some lobbying by google then by all means so be it - certainly they appeared to have kissed the ring as of late. But keep in mind googlers personally direct money into the eff every year too.

>they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.

I dislike Google as much as the next guy, but, regardless of its intentions in making Chrome and Android open source and secure, it has a huge positive impact on privacy and human rights.

This is a bizarre take that doesn't account for the impact google has had. Over the last 15 years, Google has steadily and deliberately maximized the commoditization of user data, single handedly driven the adtech industry into an unstoppable enshittification engine, built a moat out of making the internet a much worse place, swung around their money and legal resources to squash small companies, destroyed users lives when they made the mistake of depending on Google for anything important, are enthusiastic participants in global scale political manipulation, censorship, and outright market manipulation.

The purpose of a thing is what it does - android and chrome and everything else Google does serves to maintain or extend their control over the value and flow of user data.

Android and Chrome are net negatives. Google subsumed Firefox, made Mozilla beholden to them, derailed their viability as a competitor to chrome, poached talent, manipulated user exposure, degraded performance targeting competitors, and otherwise engaged in ruthless corporate fuckery to get where they are, with near absolute dominance of the browser market. Android is touted as an alternative to Apple, but they just as enthusiastically build up walled gardens, abuse consumer trust, play into monopolistic market dynamics, empower ISPs and others to force a "you actually rent your device" type model on consumers, and otherwise maximize the amount of money extracted per user without any concurrent return in value.

The internet, smartphones, and browsers are a dystopian, cynical abomination, and if there's any justice in the universe, AI will result in the total dissolution of giant tech companies like Google, and there will be a future free of institutions like it.

FWIW, I think Google is overly-hated, but it's hard to frame them as a bleeding-heart altruist. Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.

>Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.

I don't get it. In the first sentence you're claiming that there's "basically no obligation to individual consumers", but when they do a pro-consumer thing, you dismiss it as being "made to cover their own ass". Which one is it? Is this just a lot of words to say that Google isn't as pro-consumer as you'd like it to be?

“Covering their ass” from government pressure. If they can’t provide it they can’t be dinged for not doing so.

I don't think Google genuinely does a lot of these things to truly be pro-consumer. One could see these kind of actions as them not wanting to have to deal with the bad publicity of handling all this data that they overall haven't been able to really monetize well anyways.

The truth is probably somewhere in between if you were to actually sit down and talk with all the people involved with such a decision.

Regardless of the reasons though I do think we should give praise to companies and organizations doing things that ultimately benefit us though. We should give feedback as to the changes we like to let decision-makers know people actually do care.

Companies like Google are too large to have single, clear motives.

I think it is appropriate to judge their actions, but I am not sure any simplistic “good motives/bad motives“ discussion can be fruitful.

Exactly. A lot of people acted like the attacks on Waymos during the ICE protests were random but they were anything but. All the local organizers are well aware of Google's contracts with ICE as well as the tributes Google paid to Trump.

How is this relevant? Just because you disagree with some vague connection between two entities doesn't give you the right to destroy property. That's the definition of a childish tantrum. Inflicting blind pain on random, unrelated people because you don't get your way.

There's a rhetorical dodge in this argument where it transitioned from talking about property destruction to talking about harming people.

One can cause the other, but the burden of proof is on the claimant that wrecking a mass-produced special purpose autonomous vehicle did more tangible harm to a human being than make some engineer sad before they rolled up their sleeves and built a replacement.

The Waymo emphatically did not care it was destroyed.

It's relevant because Waymo is Google

How can you justify anarchist vigilante violence?

Should I be legally allowed to assault you or vandalize your property because I think your political orientation or that of your company is not "on the right side of history" ?

Come on. Not that I support destroying anything, private or public, for rhetorical effect. But assaulting someone or destroying their property has an incomparably larger impact on that individual than destroying a vehicle that won't even show up in Google's balance sheet.

>an incomparably larger impact on that individual than destroying a vehicle that won't even show up in Google's balance sheet.

Same re*arded argument people use to justify shoplifting. Now tell me genius, what happens to the shops in areas with high crime?

I didn't justify anything. Just pointed out the false equivalence. We could also argue about the effect of systemic shoplifting, but that is also neither here nor there.

I worked at google some years back, in the VR team for a while. I can't speak to all of google, but at least in that org, the amount of nonsense we had to go through to make sure there wasn't some way some genius could figure something out related to personal information by correlating various pieces of data that we were storing in good faith to improve the product was absurd.

They were trying really really hard to do the right thing. Lots of people really cared about it, many to the point of it being detrimental to just making the product better.

From my time there, a favorite quip of mine, towards some new startup we bought was: welcome to Google, here is a list of every settlement and consent decree you are now subject to.

They don't get credit for this particular thing because many, many users lost years of their location data in the transition, and most of the rest had theirs corrupted. It was a poorly-executed transition that screwed a lot of people, so even they themselves don't tout it much.

If Google had decided to move on this back when people first started being falsely accused of crimes based on geofence data, they might be more deserving of credit.

For instance, in 2018:

> Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-locatio...

To be fair... I miss being able to access my location history data via the browser. So it's not a case of "google being evil", it's a case of "sane defaults", "shifting regulations", and "unintended consequences". Google should get the accolades they deserve in this case.

They killed a lot of functionality. For instance, if you opened the details of a place, it used to tell you when all your visits were. I feel the timeline is mostly abandonware these days.

Google doesn't care that their business model is hording data in a manner that puts users at risk from any malicious government official.

They merely bowed to public pressure when the press turned against Google because continuing to horde location data put women seeking abortions in legal jeopardy.

To deserve accolades, they would need to stop hording all the other types of data and adopt a business model not based on spying on everyone as much as possible.

Nobody is going to be worried about how you never litter if you're constantly kicking puppies and biting babies on the nose.

People are to busy labeling them and the rest of tech as Far Right to care.

Google has proven to not be a company to trust about privacy. It's their business model, along with selling data. A few good will public relations moves is likely nothing compared to the unseen dirt and deals they are doing.

Google is a largely autonomous machine, advancement within Google requires people to do visibly disruptive projects and prove initiative, and the next person that wants to advance may look to the same project to undo it

Leadership has their own separate causes that may form your view of what Google’s business model is, but more importantly its at the expense of ignoring the rest of Google and no interest in steering it because they are in the same system

A machine

Only two of these companies actually needs your location data to function, it's Uber and Lyft. There's a reasonable case telcos might also need the data for network purposes, but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS. It's safe to say everyone else is basically collecting data for serving ads even if they say otherwise.

The opposite of dragnet surveillance, which is what flock and geofencing warrants are: data aggregated and shared without the consent of the user, is data collection minimization even when done for security or apps.

> but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS

Worth noting that 6G MIMO beamforming requires being able to calculate incredibly accurate location information in order to tune the signal towards your device. I don't know enough to be able to speak more in depth about this, but my guess would be that the adage of cell AP based aGPS is likely to be able to surface far more accurate device location than before.

with 6G we as humans in everywhere will be able to achieve surveillance that was impossible to think decades ago!

Incredible

> but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS

My knowledge in this topic is not deep, but cell precision should be pretty accurate, because modern cell tower areas are much smaller, then to have well tuned beamformer it need to have relative precise angles between antennas and know signal travel time (distance). I think it should achieve something 30 or 15 meter precision (doing assumption that distance is accurate in 50/100ns order)

> Only two of these companies actually needs your location data to function, it's Uber and Lyft.

I disagree that they need my location data. I am perfectly capable of telling them the location where I want a pick-up, and they are perfectly capable of imposing penalties if I incorrectly report it. Just like happened with cabs in the old days, who were somehow able to pick me up without real-time location tracking.

(Not to say that you shouldn't be able to just turn on location tracking if that's what you want to do, but there's no reason that they can't function without it.)

Completely concur with this, though I do miss being able to browse for places in Google Maps and easily see when I was last there. This functionality disappeared when my location information went local only.

I hate this change. I loved how the original Timeline worked, and now it's unusable. I don't care about courts subpoeaning my data. I'd love to opt in to previous status quo. I don't care about the loss of "privacy" in the context that was never important to me.

Most people are like me: they don't care about being protected from the courts, because the courts don't pose risk to them, and as a matter of statistical fact, they are correct.

The problem is, unfortunately, those data lakes are in the category "safe until they aren't." Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws in the European sphere, for example, because they know that the courts (and executive) don't pose a risk to most Germans... Until suddenly they do, and the only defense is not having aggregated the data in the first place.

To be clear, no disagreement with your self-risk-assessment, and reasonable people can disagree on where their paranoia threshold is.

The courts are already a risk there cause of how they handle speech

Places that aren't the United States aren't obliged to treat their history of speech the way the US does.

The US's protections are rooted in observations of local authority (and Crown-backed authority) trying to disrupt what the revolutionaries self-observed to be peaceful demonstrations, peaceful entry of thought into the public discourse, and public discourse itself. It's grounded in Enlightenment-era belief that unsuppressed discourse is the best path to real truths, and respect for real truths via the distributed, democratic comprehension of them are the foundation of good governance and good society.

Germany watched a significantly post-Enlightenment, free, democratic people talk its way from democracy straight into fascism, and concluded that some kinds of discourse are so toxic to the actual practice of discovery of the aforementioned truths that they are to be excluded from the public sphere.

Both cultures came by their conclusions honestly and there's some merit to both points of view.

Germany had restricted speech before WWI or WWII too, and they're mistaken if they think it's going to protect them from fascism this time.

Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws. And yet... Germany has a central registry of all Jews, because of the address registration and the religion tax. The last thing you would expect them to have!

Huh? My understanding is that they have religion data only for catholics/protestants, and only on local level, not in a central database. Which yes that should be killed too but no other faith is recorded, since they only collect taxes for those two.

This position is insanely illiberal. This isn't about your individual safety, or how willing you as an individual are to abdicate your right to privacy. It's about the knock-on effect of living under panopticon conditions, the chilling effect, the loss of trust, and the nearly unlimited potential for abuse. This individualistic attitude makes it so easy to divide and conquer each and every one of your rights and protections, and will leave you less free as an individual than if you were willing to look at the bigger picture and stand up for rights you don't personally care about.

Maybe, but in MN, they just decided as a matter of the state constitution that this basically isn't allowable.

You see, the cops had a murder in a remote place. They got a warrant, and the warrant showed 12 people in and out of a small area near the murder, of which one phone went there many times.

They got another warrant, for that one phone, and traced it back to someone who is obviously the murderer. The courts decided to suppress this, never mind the cops got warrants at both steps, and their investigation was as minimally invasive as one could imagine for this sort of thing.

So it's not unreasonable to wonder just what we're protecting sometimes, as I understand that while the decision here doesn't technically ban all geofence warrants, it makes them nearly impossible as a practical matter.

One can read the decision here:

https://mncourts.gov/_media/migration/appellate/supreme-cour...

Exactly, and to make sure that never happens again why not just arrest all 12 of those people until they prove their innocence? With enough constant surveillance we can be positive that no bad person ever gets away with anything.

Honestly, do you look at the justice system in the United States and think "You know the real issue here is that not enough people are being punished"?

> Honestly, do you look at the justice system in the United States and think "You know the real issue here is that not enough people are being punished"?

I have a family member who was murdered. I have a lot of sympathy for victims of violent crimes like this and a hard time understanding people who want to let the murderers go free, because I know what it's like living under the threat of one who kept a list of who they intended to kill next.

My sympathies for your loss. That sucks badly.

But look at how many people have been unjustly/incorrectly imprisoned for many years in the US, often based on poverty or racism. Would you be willing to jail 5 people for life-without-parole if you're 100% sure ONE of them was the murderer of your family member? What about two people?

I've never seen someone get sent to prison just because their phone was too close to a crime scene, there's always more to corroborate it because it's not much on its own, even if the MN case comes pretty close with only one person in a remote area with the dead body over and over who also coincidentally had motive, etc. Most of the famous cases of what you mention rely on humans identifying a person and DNA later exonerating them.

So I'm loathe to rule out the use of more accurate ways to pinpoint investigations when the status quo is someone who thinks they saw the person at the scene, when we know how unreliable that is.

That feels like throwing out DNA because there are many explanations of why it might be at a crime scene in favor of good old fashioned witness identification, never mind one is a lot better than the other, even if both of them have been misused terribly at times.

That's why I think we should want the cops to use methods that cause fewer people to get wrongly investigated, because it is a burden. It's true, your phone being too close to a crime scene doesn't make you a criminal, but it's probably a better reason for investigating you than traditional things like "I saw a guy who looked like that at the scene" which has much more frequently caused the harm you cite, and yet it's been a staple of courts longer than any of us have been alive.

I think in much the same way that your life has been touched by a murderer and it has influenced your opinion, if you were wrongly accused of a crime it would likewise have influence.

That being said, I'm sympathetic to your point here and I'm not advocating for eye witness testimony becoming the only source of truth. If I could somehow know for sure that this would ONLY be used for the worst of violent crimes it would soften my opinion, but I am very sure that the more normalized this sort of dragnet investigation becomes the standard of what "requires" it's use will get lower and lower.

If policing were entirely focused on violent and property crimes many of my opinions might change, but realistically I think we can agree that whatever investigative technique we are talking about will primarily end up being used to prosecute drug crimes, because that is much safer and more profitable for the police. Do you really want to be on a suspect list everytime someone thinks they saw a drug deal somewhere and you happened to be near?

Sorry, I’m not chilled at all by the prospect that the court can subpoena my data from Goole. It can already issue a warrant to arrest me, and to search my actual home.

It kind of sounds like you are saying you don't care if other people are hurt, as long as it doesn't impact you. I hope that isn't what you actually mean.

That's not a good faith, or even vaguely accurate, reading of the parent comment.

I'm not sure how else to read this:

Most people are like me: they don't care about being protected from the courts, because the courts don't pose risk to them, and as a matter of statistical fact, they are correct.

The trouble is that you aren't chilled at all today.

Tomorrow's government may decide that attending certain protests, or having "associated" with certain people was always a crime. It doesn't even need to be "retroactive", since enforcement and interpretation of the law is always adjustable in the present.

This sort of thing is happening today in certain countries. Why are you so sure it won't happen to you in yours?

Most people don't have your luxury of not worrying about government overreach.

It sure would have been useful for governments in the South to grab the location data of enslaved people trying to escape—would they, like the average user today, have known to turn off these settings?

It's great for Texas to buy data from brokers about women trying to access reproductive healthcare across state lines from apps carelessly sharing it. The courts don't pose a risk to you until the law changes and suddenly they do.

This is about the government getting data through a loophole that violates the 4th amendment—the difference between a society that collects everything and presumes guilt, and one that targets specific people when they're suspected of a specific crime.

If you'd like, I can develop a product that will track your location and report it to the police in real-time for you.

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