Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Perchance do they make iPhones in Dongguan, Guangdong, China?

Evidently I was there on November 15, which (thankfully) seems to coincide with the order date for my new phone. At least I'd prefer that somebody on the testing line turned it on for long enough for it to store the location, rather the alternative of somebody having logged into my Google account from there.

Regardless, I'm going to disagree with pretty much everybody here and say that this is really cool. Except for the part where the little dot stays inside my house for entire 5-day stretches. Please tell me I just left my phone on the charger, and not that I didn't actually open my front door for an entire week!

This is interesting. Why would a location data point created during testing show up in your location history? You should be logged in for google to make it a data point on your account.

Simple guess is there's software outside of your google account that tracks the location. Then, once you're google account is assigned to that phone, the google account is mapped to that software and therefore assigned to all of that phone's location history.

About a year ago, Google started having new Nexus devices from the Google Play ship pre-configured to your Google Account before they leave the factory. (It makes the box-opening more magical -- turn it on and GMail works, as opposed to turn it on and then have to type in your email address and password.) So if the new device was one of these, presumably someone or something in China turned it on and did some voodoo magic to pre-install your account on the device before it went into a box to be shipped to you.

I agree with what you said for Nexus or any other android devices. But OP was talking about iPhones. And that is why it seemed not very plausible.

Foxconn's newest manufacturing / assembly plant is in Dongguan and was, supposedly, built mostly to handle Apple's devices

Reply on news.ycombinator.com