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The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

theguardian.com

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Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#121

Post by asquabventured »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #116
BoxOfRain wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>boat enthusiasts Boat enthusiast here, I'm afraid even that'll be a struggle! I'm planning to move onto a sailing yacht fairly soon and carry on my job as a backend web developer, mobile internet is good enough to make this viable and things like Starlink will make it even easier in the coming years. I suppose you can still turn off the telescreen if you want to though, if you sail out of range of mobile towers and…

I hate to break it to you all, but there are computers in the sky now, too.

Yeah sure, that was some great intel from computers in the sky during our last drone strike in Kabul that killed a humanitarian NGO and his family. [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/us/politics/pentagon-dron...

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#122

Post by Syonyk »

ghaff wrote: post #74
Forbo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you care about privacy just don't carry a phone. I feel like this position is unrealistic. Privacy is possible with a modern smartphone. Using an alternative OS on Android devices can help facilitate this. I've been using GrapheneOS as a daily driver for nearly six months now. Any issues I've run into have largely been due to my own configuration of the device. You can also get a lot of useful information from M…

>I feel like this position is unrealistic. I'm not sure it's unrealistic but the tradeoffs for ditching a phone entirely day-in day-out wouldn't work for most people. As you say there are alternatives for smartphones and one could presumably alternatively carry a feature phone that can't be easily tied to their identity. (Although there's an increasing assumption that you have a smartphone to accomplish various tasks…

> Although there's an increasing assumption that you have a smartphone to accomplish various tasks

Indeed, because... basically everyone carries one.

So, in order to counter that, more people need to not carry one. Not just object to using smartphones, but, "Look, I literally don't own one, I know you want me to install thus and such app to complete some survey before entering the building, but I can't. What's the alternative?"

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#123

Post by rastafang »

midnightGhost wrote: post #100
AlbertCory wrote: post #69

Someone (Eric Schmidt? not sure) once said, "If you really want something to be private, don't put it on a computer." Still the best advice. Rather than storing it and then worrying about where it goes, just don't store it.

Eric Schmidt also said in a interview back when Google was starting up that they wanted to get Google right up to the "creepy line" but not cross it. This interview was also put in a documentary called "The Creepy Line." I'll see if I can find the interview though and link it to this comment. Edit: https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=mpmOL-MT5lQ

Nice, yt-dlp is able to download that video.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#125

Post by judge2020 »

Forbo wrote: post #68
refulgentis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true: when location is turned off, location is turned off. Apple still has a loophole where turning off Bluetooth doesn't turn off Bluetooth, but location should be "fixed"

I thought the Bluetooth thing only applied from the quick menu. I've been told if you disable it in Settings that it will actually turn it off.

This is true. And when you turn it off from control center, it says 'disconnecting bluetooth devices until tomorrow', so it's clear that disabling it means "stop all BT connections except for my Watch".

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#127

Post by AlbertCory »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #75
AlbertCory wrote: post #69

Someone (Eric Schmidt? not sure) once said, "If you really want something to be private, don't put it on a computer." Still the best advice. Rather than storing it and then worrying about where it goes, just don't store it.

Don't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of a computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's camera: getting pretty impossible to follow this advice.

I'm not minimizing the dangers of someone else recording you. I don't think Schmidt was even thinking about that, probably because smartphones weren't so ubiquitous then.

However, you CAN control what you do yourself. Your to-do list can quite easily be on a paper notebook, as can your journal. Another thread here talks about self-hosting your location history -- why TF would you even want that? You can leave your phone at home when you go places where you don't need it. You can talk to people instead of texting them. All these things might be inconvenient, and amusing for some of your friends. But you'll survive it.

Maybe you can't shut off the flow of data about you, but you can at least refrain from adding to it.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#128

Post by judge2020 »

DeWilde wrote: post #84
refulgentis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true: when location is turned off, location is turned off. Apple still has a loophole where turning off Bluetooth doesn't turn off Bluetooth, but location should be "fixed"

Cell phone towers can still track you, unless you don't have a SIM card.

Until mmWave 5G becomes the norm, LTE towers aren't as accurate as the GPS data obtained by Google. The difference between 30 meters of accuracy[0] and a few meters with Galileo/GPS[1] could be the difference of a search yielding everyone in one building and finding everyone in the neighboring buildings on the same block.

0: https://www.marketingdive.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/news/res...

1: https://www.deingenieur.nl/artikel/after-13-years-galileo-sa...

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#129

Post by titzer »

1. Turn off Google location history.

2. Disable all Google apps' access to your location.

3. Disable Android's "high accuracy location" if possible in your Android version. This little snitch collects terrifyingly precise "anonymized" location information fused with device sensors.

Do not accept surveillance in the name of convenience. And don't let Google normalize even more intrusion into our lives. Don't use their services.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#130

Post by judge2020 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #127
dimitrios1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of a computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's camera: getting pretty impossible to follow this advice.

I'm not minimizing the dangers of someone else recording you. I don't think Schmidt was even thinking about that, probably because smartphones weren't so ubiquitous then. However, you CAN control what you do yourself. Your to-do list can quite easily be on a paper notebook, as can your journal. Another thread here talks about self-hosting your location history -- why TF would you even want that? You can leave your ph…

> All these things might be inconvenient, and amusing for some of your friends. But you'll survive it.

The entire point of such self-hosting is to achieve a similar level of convenience provided by the megacorps' products without them being able to profit off of your usage of them. People who will consider 'not tracking location' and 'only talking to people face to face' aren't the ones considering self-hosting their location data (unless their only reason for doing so was the megacorps' profit model).

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