Waze: Google’s New Spying Tool | Hacker News Reader

Waze: Google’s New Spying Tool

zdziarski.com

48 pointsjzdziarski9 comments

The "I am not a lawyer" should be in the back of your mind whenever the author talks about the legalities of this software agreement.

It is possible to both anonymize and aggregate GPS-data to a degree where it is neigh impossible to reverse engineer.

The "we provide data to governments when we have a good faith belief that legal standards are met" is boilerplate. From Facebook, to Atlassian to Wordpress.com, all privacy policies have that wording.

I found this article to be unfounded and harsh of tone. Google doesn't even need Waze to spy on you. If anything: Google-NSA spying has decreased since the Snowden-revelations. They now actively secure most communications, lobby to be more transparent to their users, and fix security bugs like Heartbleed. All the while keeping their profitable marketing profiles on you (call that spying and the word loses its meaning).

I'm an avid waze user due to a long and traffic-dependent commute. It's hard to get worked up about the concerns raised in this article simply because I view where I'm driving essentially as public information (as almost all of my commute is on public property), and because the data collected is so clearly necessary for providing the features the app advertises.

> Your GPS location and driving routes. Of course, some of this is needed to deliver the services described, however it does not need to be stored indefinitely. Waze’s privacy policy states that this information will be used to “create a detailed location history of all the journeys you have made”. The question, of course, is “for whom, exactly?”.

It's for you, and for the Waze community at large. When you drive, your most recent routes are saved and you are allowed to edit some area around your route for some amount of time after. This allows you to update the map both for yourselves an others (new road closure near your house? Mark it on the map), which will affect Waze's routing when giving you directions. Tracking where you've been ensures you only edit areas you're legitimately familiar with.

> To spam you with marketing and advertising materials when using Waze; specifically location-specific advertisements using your GPS history.

These are pretty unobtrusive, and I don't really disagree with them in principal. There are already location-specific ads along my route in the form of billboards and signs.

> To email you marketing and advertising materials

I've never gotten an email from Waze, but I could easily block it if I did. I would only be concerned if they were giving out my email to other third-party advertisers that would be difficult to block.

> To conduct surveys and questionnaires (possibly for others, using your data)

I've seen these a couple of times, they're easy to ignore and dismiss. They only show up when you're stopped somewhere. And they're pretty benign, like "Have you seen one of these brands on the map recently?" (referring to little fast food icons which I find rather helpful)

But the biggest thing to note here is that you can turn off Waze at any time, and if you don't trust it to not use GPS when sleeping, then you can enforce that at the OS level.

> It's hard to get worked up about the concerns raised in this article simply because I view where I'm driving essentially as public information (as almost all of my commute is on public property), and because the data collected is so clearly necessary for providing the features the app advertises.

That part makes sense - you're driving on public roads - but the article mentions a very long list of additional information that is collected on you. Most of which is not clearly necessary for providing the advertised features. That's the worrying part.

In this context it's worth noting that Waze is available in Europe too. And contrary to the US, in Europe you generally have an expectation of privacy even in public and on public property.

Of course you can give that privacy up voluntarily, but I don't think being tracked on your daily commute would sit well with most people over here.

I totally get why people don't want to be tracked, even on public roads, but the transportation engineering/urban planning part of me feels like the (anonymized) data would be FANTASTIC for transportation agencies who spend time/money on getting similar but less accurate data through surveys.

I considered trying to figure out if people could voluntarily submit their trip/GPS data (also anonymized) to agencies instead of the traditional survey but have little idea how to do that kind of stuff.

It's hard to get worked up about the concerns raised in this article simply because I view where I'm driving essentially as public information (as almost all of my commute is on public property)

But the start and end points are critical information. Google now knows where you live and who/where you visit. That's pretty private information and I think most people would like a good assurance that Google won't abuse this knowledge.

Unfortunately the EULA gives them free reign to do what they like with this data and they can choose to give it to others who may also do nasty things with it.

If all of the things have been found in the EULA why it is called spying?

It would have been a great thing explaining what is wrong in my comment

> This is just too messy for me. Waze’s privacy policy guarantees anything but privacy. It’s a misnomer to call it a privacy policy, when in fact, it’s a very lengthy document granting the company (and Google) the rights to claim ownership of, and potentially abuse, your personal data. There are virtually no consumer rights stated in this privacy policy whatsoever, in fact. The entire policy only benefits Waze legally, financially, and in virtually every other way.

I propose "Privacy Policies" be renamed to "Tracking Policies", because that's what they really are these days. They are all about the ways in which you allow the company to track you, keep and use your data.

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