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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

> Perhaps, but without a proper study of their users (and potential future users), how can they infer their intent,

In this case, they don't need to infer my intent. My intent is clear: I have not gone into the app settings and configured it differently. I disabled location services at the OS level for the entire application.

My intent could not be more clear.

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Maybe you are afraid Path is using location services in the background or have some other reason to fear that Path is improperly requesting your current location. This does NOT imply that you don't want Path to have EXIF location data from photos you provide it.

A much better option would simply be to provide a simple interface to allow users to exclude this information each time they post a photo and/or in the application settings.

The only clear intent that can be gathered from turning off Location Services is that you do not want Path to access your phone's location sensors. This is pretty explicit in iOS Settings. It is not at all clear that you do not intend for Path to use other sources of location information that you explicitly choose to share, like photos or status updates.

> It is not at all clear that you do not intend for Path to use other sources of location information that you explicitly choose to share, like photos or status updates.

You're right, it's not clear. So, it should explicitly ask when you do so.

(I don't use Path so I don't know if it in fact asks this or at least makes clear that it will be sharing your photo locations before doing so. The article implies it does not.)

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