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Comment by dylanjermiah | Hacker News Reader

What nefarious use of the data will be beneficial to Google?

Google can be hacked or forced by public authorities to enable or to do nefarious things. I know, godwin’s law, bla bla, but look what happened during the second world war to german companies. There are more examples.

I’m not okay with being tracked, and I don’t care whether the tracker swears to be or not to be evil. And no, this is not negotiable.

I'm especially not OK with being tracked when it has absolutely zero benefit for me, long or short term. UI is getting worse (for all these megacorps that harvest all the "automated feedback" they can) and I don't consume advertising and even if I did, the "targeted ads" are irrelevant pretty much all the time.

Tracking is the only way for Google to get traffic data; you could still not find that reason enough to get tracked, but it's not "zero benefit" for users.

I'm quite sure they, and other map providers who have live traffic info (including HERE), get the data primarily from infrastructure managers.

I don't know if anything changed recently, but I'm sure that at least until a couple years ago they got the traffic info from their own app.

Apart from NSA et.al., there is huge commercial value in movement profiles:

- Visiting a physician a lot? You future health insurance might wanna know.

- Spend a lot of time in the red light district? That must be worth a couple of bucks to your employer who wants to get rid of you.

You might think that this is far fetched and right now, it still is. But 20 years ago, most people would have considered it very implausible and offensive that their private conversations (emails) or library searches (web searches) are sold to advertisers. Well, lets see what (some) people find acceptable 20 years from now.

Google is a US company, bound by US constition & law. Which doesn't extend a right to privacy to non-USAians outside the USA.

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