111–120 of 220 posts
Your convenience at the expense of your privacy. I personally think it's great that I can lookup what I did two months ago thanks to Google services. I adblock and disable as much ad tracking as possible but I'm pretty happy with how useful google services are for my day to day errands. It reminds me of places I went two years ago that I couldn't remember without it. I find it strange people complain about it, yet st…
A few nights ago I was watching the 2002 film The Bourne Identity. There's a line where one of the characters is horrified that the government knows she's traveling with someone else. "How can they know we're together?!" she shrieks.
Today you just ask Google or Facebook, and it will tell you who's together, where, and for how long. And with a straight face they tell you it's a feature, not a bug.
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It is very much not anonymized. It is trivially easy (albeit not cheap - around $10k/month) to buy access to mobile ad id data, draw a polygon around your house, and get all the “anonymous” ids. From there, you can see all other locations of those ids. When they anonymize you, that just means they give you an is not linked to your phone number or account. It doesn’t mean someone can’t link it for you. The best defens…
Google does not sell my data.
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Behind a CGNAT, which most mobiles devices are, makes that point fairly moot. When I look up "my ip" on the phone it's always in a capital city 6 hours away. Your mileage may vary of course.
There are only three mobile carriers in the US, which means at most three organizations controlling the CGNATs. I can assure you that they are selling the reverse port-to-user mapping to the highest bidders.
Seems insane to me, it's one of those thing you take for granted elsewhere, yeah of course my mobile ISP knows my location, as does the govt if they ask the ISP in an email, that's fine. (Quite sure most carriers have no qualms just handing it over on request)
But just selling that info for cents to any third party seems so utterly egregious and a massive betrayal of consumer trust.
This is how fascism works. You don't own the data about you - Google does. So, whoever controls government can just ask Google for information about you. No warrant required.
Just using GMail could help Google to find your approx. location 7/24. Your phone checking emails all the time, so google knows your ip.
I turned off mail sync, I only trigger it manually, so there is a way to avoid the constant checking.
I am about to delete Google Maps on my iPhone. Are all those issues valid on an iPhone as well or does Apple limit it‘s privacy evading features? Edit: Done. Deleted it. Now if only I had an alternative to Garmin Connect. Love my fitness watch (Garmin Fenix), but hate the way they collect data about me. And no alternative.
You could just turn off location history in the settings.
One of the most disappointing changes in Android recently is that any network-assisted geolocation plugins must now be installed as a system app, not a user app. That means that even if you use LineageOS where most Google stuff has been stripped out, getting a GPS fix through network assistance still sends data to Google servers. Only a tiny minority of users are comfortable working with the command line and will ins…
> getting a GPS fix through network assistance still sends data to Google servers Well, that's not a GPS fix. If you want a traceless position fix, use GPS Navstar / Glonass / Beidu / Galileo. Yes it takes longer from cold start, but that's the trade-off for privacy.
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I always deactivate geolocation and I assume and hope it doesn't phone home to Google in that case. I still deactivate network if I don't need it. Android devices cannot really be trusted and it seems to be getting worse. Of course I am not using contact tracing either in this case, but I certainly won't allow Google to trace my location.
If I understand it correctly, contact tracing should rely on bluetooth only. Does it require location services and/or network on Android?