Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 348 posts

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#81

Post by joshuamorton »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #76
jeffbee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which specific factual aspect of this story do you believe contradicts those claims? I'm a Xoogler, not a Googler, but in my post-Google experience I haven't seen anything that was even in the same league as Google's privacy controls. In my personal privacy threat model I think Google scores 10/10. They protect my data against external attackers, which in my view is the main problem faced by personal data, and their…

How is Google ranking 10/10 on protecting user privacy if they considered people choosing to shut off their location tracking as a crisis worthy of pressuring OEMs to make it harder? The thing Googlers and Xooglers alike seem absolutely unable to grapple with is that Google itself is a major privacy threat, and we don't want Google itself to have this information. The fox is guarding the henhouse, and all the fox is…

Different people have different privacy threat models. Gp even mentioned as much.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#82

Post by ocdtrekkie »

joshuamorton wrote: post #81
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Google ranking 10/10 on protecting user privacy if they considered people choosing to shut off their location tracking as a crisis worthy of pressuring OEMs to make it harder? The thing Googlers and Xooglers alike seem absolutely unable to grapple with is that Google itself is a major privacy threat, and we don't want Google itself to have this information. The fox is guarding the henhouse, and all the fox is…

Different people have different privacy threat models. Gp even mentioned as much.

Again, that you want, good for you. But when Google let people choose, and people choose in a way they didn't like, they immediately reversed course, pressured OEMs to make that user choice harder.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#83

Post by joshuamorton »

nojito wrote: post #48
quotemstr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google and Facebook’s business models depend deeply on being able to track information that consumers are increasingly unhappy to share I see no evidence that regular people are particularly unhappy with sharing their information. While it's true that on the internet there's a loud privacy activist movement that's grown over the past few years, I don't think this movement reflects the true preferences of the silent…

>I see no evidence that regular people are particularly unhappy with sharing their information. There's actually a pretty cool graph from Google from the court docs that says the opposite. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2f1tSEWYAAVHGY?format=jpg&name=...

That graph didn't have a scale. It could be that 97% of users disabled the feature, or less than 1%. You just don't know.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#84

Post by joshuamorton »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #82
joshuamorton wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different people have different privacy threat models. Gp even mentioned as much.

Again, that you want, good for you. But when Google let people choose, and people choose in a way they didn't like, they immediately reversed course, pressured OEMs to make that user choice harder.

That's fine, but your comment makes no sense in response to someone who explicitly talked about their personal threat model. Of course they can grasp that other people have different ones, that's why they scoped the comment to their own.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#85

Post by vageli »

dv_dt wrote: post #68
mistrial9 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as an American skilled in computer science, I am literally aghast at what the mobile phone has done in barely fifteen years, degrading decades and in fact centuries of individual rights mores. Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, in East Asia, there was a completely different series of social evolutions, such that a large majority of people are not bothered and in fact expect services tied to identity tied to finance. Th…

In a way it seems pragmatic. You say all the boundaries are being violated, you might as well get something out of it. Also I’m not sure there’s a lot of difference in loss of privacy and tapping or swiping a credit card.

> Also I’m not sure there’s a lot of difference in loss of privacy and tapping or swiping a credit card.

Well for one thing, at least in my experience, most credit card transaction data does not include granular information about the transaction (like the list of groceries you bought).

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#86

Post by bogwog »

ttt0 wrote: post #32
ppf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always amused by calls for the breakup of the "unbearable monopoly" of Google, when it is itself the epitome of the Silicon Valley "monopolies need disrupting!" business model.

Got a better idea? I'd like to see them bankrupt and all their data being wiped, but I'm afraid that's just not going to happen. Breaking them up is the only option we realistically have as of right now.

I think we should simply pass laws to make their business model illegal (at least the evil parts), and let them sort it out.

If they go under because they can’t adapt, well tough luck. There will be tons of smart businesses, investors, and individuals eager to chase all the new opportunities the death of Google would create.

And since the evil business models are illegal, the ones that come next will (probably) not be evil like Google was. And if they are, more regulations!

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#87

Post by [deleted] »

sthnblllII wrote: post #36
toastal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ran into this today logging into PayPal (the password-must-be-8-20-characters payment service) for the first time in a long time to buy a band t-shirt. After jumping through two different types of CAPTCHAs, now they require you share your phone number to log in. I contacted support via Twitter saying they have my email if they want to verify a login because I'm not comfortable with SIM jacking nor how data-mining is…

Stuff like paypal exist so that powerful people can shut you out of the economy if you challenge their power. They complain about money laundering while the CIA is the biggest money launderer in the world and no one goes to jail when Deutsche bank launders Jeffery Epstein's payments. But operating a Bitcoin mixer is a federal offense. They are scared.

[deleted]

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#88

Post by ipython »

dv_dt wrote: post #68
mistrial9 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as an American skilled in computer science, I am literally aghast at what the mobile phone has done in barely fifteen years, degrading decades and in fact centuries of individual rights mores. Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, in East Asia, there was a completely different series of social evolutions, such that a large majority of people are not bothered and in fact expect services tied to identity tied to finance. Th…

In a way it seems pragmatic. You say all the boundaries are being violated, you might as well get something out of it. Also I’m not sure there’s a lot of difference in loss of privacy and tapping or swiping a credit card.

Using a credit card still has an easily recognizable physical interaction element that’s easy for most people to understand. “I swipe my card, so my card company and maybe others know what I bought and where”.

The pervasive passive collection on a mobile phone is harder to internalize. “I carry a persistent, always on radio beacon that can record and transmit to arbitrary third parties all of my actions, searches, continual location, contacts both electronically and in person, and is tied directly to my identity (many countries require ID to obtain a SIM card)” is not how most non tech people would describe their mobile phone.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#89

Post by eingaeKaiy8ujie »

bogwog wrote: post #75
C-x_C-f wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI you can install GrapheneOS on a Pixel (3rd to 5th gen)

Just looked that up, and the site describes the project as > GrapheneOS is a privacy and security focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility What does that mean? Is it a built-from-scratch OS with an Android compatability layer (like Blackberry 10), or is it just an indirect way of saying they’re based on Android (like Cyanognemod/Lineage OS)?

It's based on the latest Android (AOSP) + privacy/security improvements. From a UX point of view it's basically a vanilla Android without any proprietary Google code (which means no Google Play of course but you can install F-Droid). The main developer is a security researcher and many of his improvements have been accepted upstream to AOSP.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#90

Post by jtrip »

jeffbee wrote: post #56
arkades wrote: post #31

Earlier this week there was a post regarding Google and its utilization of private health information. A number of Googlers came forward to describe how very seriously Google takes user privacy and keeping inappropriate data from being shared across silos. I got the overall impression of Googlers taking the position of “you guys don’t know how seriously we take peoples privacy.” If any of those Googlers would please…

Which specific factual aspect of this story do you believe contradicts those claims? I'm a Xoogler, not a Googler, but in my post-Google experience I haven't seen anything that was even in the same league as Google's privacy controls. In my personal privacy threat model I think Google scores 10/10. They protect my data against external attackers, which in my view is the main problem faced by personal data, and their…

What you suggest shows that individuals within the Google organisation do not have blatant open access to personal information. What do you think about the access of personal information to the organisation Google itself? Today the data is safe from menial concerns such as a google employee looking over private information, but what about tomorrow when whole troughs of such private information are made available to other organisations, a la Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, for commercial or other nefarious purposes?

The article here talks about how google executives deliberately made privacy settings harder to find because the people were actually using them. The article also suggests, through court documents, that google coerced other manufacturers to do the same.

Post reply on HN