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
The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
141–150 of 327 posts
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#142If I don't allow my search history to be stored by Google, can police still search it?
No protections occur when private citizens (or companies) give up information to police voluntarily, so the police aren't "searching" anything, in the legal sense of them needing probable cause to obtain information on you.
The only way to stop them from getting anything from Google is to not use Google (and Bing, Yahoo, etc). If Google can tie incognito searches to your name (eg. via IP association), they likely will turn it over in these data requests.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
So there's a record of everyone they sell a shack to? Come on. You gotta build your own Kaczynski shack. Amateur hour over here.
Your non-proffesional bulk purchases of wood and/or logging equipment, as well as subsequent reduction of general consumer goods consumption has registered you as a 'potential kaczynski shack owner'.
If you pay cash and get it from out of town I don't see how they'd track you, unless the lumber store is doing facial recognition and uploading that data somewhere.
Maybe we need straw buyers for lumber?
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything on Android is totally moot. You can "turn off locations" but you don't know if it has. It also has a dozen other ways to track you when correlated with others, such as inertial, wifi, cell cgi, audio, magnetic, bluetooth, optical, pressure, etc; some of which are in the baseband and inaccessible to the OS. You can keep it in a faraday bag but it can still record and upload later. Same thing could be said abo…
> 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…
It's not unrealistic to not carry a phone everywhere. Do you really need to be reachable while you're at the grocery store? Unless you're on call or a firefighter, there are very few cases where you must be reachable 24/7. Try it sometime, you'd be surprised.
Carrying a phone at all times is more a matter of social pressure than anything else. If you get into a real emergency situation, you can just ask someone if you can make a call from their phone -- after all, the world is full of people walking around with phones in their pocket.
Leaving your phone at home most of the time is a little inconvenient, but it's certainly not unrealistic. It's just that most of people are happy to trade privacy for convenience.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently set my google location history to auto-delete. At first I wanted to keep it recording my location history forever because "just in case" I needed to know where I was for something that was extremely unimportant. Overall, I've looked at it only handful of times over the many years it has been running so in the end it really helps Google more than it helps me. I might even just turn it off completely. I'm sl…
Do we have reason to believe that auto-delete means anything other than "hide it from me, please?"
If so, why believe "don't save location history" would mean anything either?
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#146Is there a self hosted app to track your location? I use Google maps to keep granular history so I can use it later for whatever. But if I could self host that’d be better.
I use home assistant with their android app. It can/does use google location services, however I believe you can also set it to use gps.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know someone from school who is a fairly senior manager at one of the FAANGs. He only got a cell phone in the first place because he and his wife adopted and the nanny insisted. I know he has a company-issued smartphone now. Don't know if his personal phone is a smartphone by now or if he's still using a flip phone of some sort.
This is another thing rarely talked about that's quite common - people really high up in the tech companies don't use the stuff. Remember, when Steve Jobs' biographer asked him what his kids thought about the iPad, his response was, "They haven't used it." You're more likely to find the "cellphone free" group among high level tech execs and such. Why is that? It's worth pondering. I know more and more people, deeply…
> This is another thing rarely talked about that's quite common - people really high up in the tech companies don't use the stuff.
This is true, kind of like how most drug dealers don't do drugs themselves.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using OwnTracks (plus ot-recorder) for a few years now, in parallel with Google's location tracking/timeline, and I find that OwnTracks tends not to update all that well or frequently. If I switch OwnTracks to "move mode", it's great, but then it drains battery like crazy. "Significant changes mode" doesn't really cut it to map out my track as I move around during the day. And it's especially annoying becau…
Ah, that's good to know. I've been meaning to set up OwnTracks with iOS, so I'll report back with how that goes, see if the accuracy/battery tradeoff is any different from what you're seeing on Android.
> I'll report back with how that goes
Out of self-interest, where would one check to (eventually) find this write-up? Sounds like OP hadn't known just how long OT takes to update on Android, which makes me assume other information out there may be out of date, or someone else's best case scenario (as opposed to real-world usage).
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's https://owntracks.org/ , which has iOS and Android apps and instructions on setting up your own server. If you run NextCloud self-hosted already, there's PhoneTrack ( https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/phonetrack ), which has a list of supported/suggested apps that send data back to it in a compatible format.
I use Google location sharing with my partner so we know where the other person is. Is owntracks a replacement for that by any chance?
If you connect OwnTracks to an mqtt broker, there is a feature to track friends. But I haven't played with that part so ymmv.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's https://owntracks.org/ , which has iOS and Android apps and instructions on setting up your own server. If you run NextCloud self-hosted already, there's PhoneTrack ( https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/phonetrack ), which has a list of supported/suggested apps that send data back to it in a compatible format.
I use Google location sharing with my partner so we know where the other person is. Is owntracks a replacement for that by any chance?
I'd hope not. We should normalize less surveillance, not more.