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Comment by TannerLD | Hacker News Reader

I don't see why disabling their cloud storage disables geotagging.

Memoto founder here, it's because the GPS radio data is converted to lat/long in the cloud. Before that it's just a radio sample. Normal GPS chips that compute the lat/long on the fly drains the battery very quickly since they need to wait for a fix. Which basically means that they wait to download the ephemeris of how satellites are positioned at the moment.

By offloading that computation to the cloud, it suffices to get a 200 ms snapshot of GPS radio data. It means we can have a duty cycle of about 500 ms instead of 30s or more, which is how the camera can have such an extended battery life.

That's a neat approach. Is this commonly done by other services? Is there any historical data accessible online, or do you record your own ephemeris data for all the satellites?

It's fairly uncommon since in most cases you actually need the geoposition in real time. We use a third party service for historical ephemeris.

Cool, in all seriousness.

Why can't owners get access to the same 200 ms snapshot of data though? To post-process that in similar ways (even if it needs reinventing the wheel if you decide to consider that a closed part of your business) later?

No data would be 'lost' and you'd be about hardware and convenience (backups, automatic tagging, whatever) instead of removing a core feature of a 'memento' device for users that want to run that thing standalone/offline.

Impossible? Will never happen? Maybe?

"Maybe" is as close as I can get to an answer right now, unfortunately. We will certainly allow developers to create cool stuff that integrates with Memoto. Either through our API or by some other means. But there are a lot of hard challenges to solve when dealing with people's private data, and it's our responsibility to take a safety-first approach to everything we do.

Thanks for the answer, but you're missing (or avoiding) my point.

The poeple in this subthread seem to be interested in your product, as far as idea and hardware are concerned. Now to please the crowd that still cringes whenever someone mentions the 'cloud' you'd need to offer a way to opt out of your online services, without losing too much functionality or even data.

What is the point of any privacy argument here? If I buy that thing from you, it seems (your words) that I can access my images locally, without using the online service. How is 'can I access the data you use to compute the GPS position' any different, privacy wise? We're talking about a device that I would potentially carry around my neck after all.

Memoto is a service where the photos from a lifelogging camera are organized and made searchable in an app in your smartphone. The cloud, no matter if you embrace that term or not, is inescapably needed as part of our tech chain. I think you would agree that data stored locally will always be a nuisance to make available in your phone without synching to cloud servers. What we provide is an option for you to keep a local copy of your photos, no matter if you synch it to Memoto Secure Storage or not. None of the functionality provided in our app will still work if you disable synching to the cloud.

We are receiving a constant stream of feature requests supporting different use cases. At the moment we focus on functionality that supports as many use cases as possible. To provide the same functionality with local storage would mean to duplicate everything we have developed into standalone software, and then support that forever.

Regarding the privacy aspect, if we allow third party apps to integrate to our API, we can allow the user to retain control over what those apps have access to. But if we would chose to make a development effort to allow locally stored data to be used as an integration point for third party apps, we can no longer provide that level of control. An app that turns out to be malicious can't be disabled across the entire user base, because it's probably installed as an executable on local computers.

Microsoft Research published a paper on this technique:

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1726...

A very interesting approach, I have never heard of it. Thanks for the clarification.

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