171–180 of 327 posts
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I know I cant avoid cell companies, but I can at least limit how much Google knows (or any other company that requires always on location). The problem is though, the data I can get from my location history from Google is really useful for me so it's been a privacy trade off I've taken.
I keep Google location history on so I can have evidence of where I was.
does it work both ways? can i present this data as an alibi when i need one? if its not deemed accurate for that why would it be considered for evidence? and if it is that seems like free alibis for everyone guilty or not ;)
Which do you think is more important? Needing to present an alibi in the case of you being wrongly accused? Or needing to conceal your actions in a world where something new has been made illegal?
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Your cell phone company knows the tower you are talking to and probably which (directional) antenna you are talking to. Antennas are in the process of getting a lot more directional with 5G, so they'll soon go from trivially being able to track you within a block or two to within a meter or two. It's not great.
The core records of a cell phone company are at a cell level, which often are configured in a 120-degree sectors from a tower. If they really want, they can see the distance from the tower because that's a requirement for the communications protocol to work (LTE at least expects to account for lightspeed delay in allocating transmission slots) and gets measured during the communications, so the operator should be abl…
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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.
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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…
I love Google Location History. If you're trying to make a point to someone about how much of a problem data collection, use, abuse, etc, is - link them to the place they can view their own history. It's even more fun if you're with them and can watch the expression of utter horror form as they realize just what, exactly, literally everywhere they've been can tell someone else about them. "Hey, isn't that the kink cl…
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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?
The only trouble Iǘe had is that the Android app sometimes crashes and I have to manually launch it again. There are other compatible apps that I haven tried, though.
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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?
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.
I remember that story about Zachary McCoy. This whole thing continues to get worse quick and will continue to get worse. I know people say we need legislation and regulation on data privacy and tech companies which we do. But before that gets taken seriously (at least in the US) it's going to take something real scandalous done by tech companies and actually affect the common folk where they actually start to care. R…
What about raising money to buy a bunch of data from, say, the Washington, D.C. area and then de-anonymizing it. I wonder what we'd learn...
1. Buy some legit(ish) dataset for marketing purposes. I hear DMVs in the US like to sell people's data.
2. Do a direct marketing job: send every single person in the dataset a snail mail letter with a printout of all the data you have on them, and a reference to where you got it from. I hear USPS offers good rates for bulk spam campaigns; they apparently live off it.
That sounds like something that is in range of crowdfunding money, could possibly be fully legal, and sidesteps the issue of news outlets killing the message, with (as I recently heard) their policy of not reporting data from leaked datasets.
Is this only unique to Google? Serious question - I switched from google to iPhone exactly for the tracking reasons, but I would think that apple does have similar data - if you have weather widget it must ping something, same thing with Maps and that’s not even accounting if you allow gps to set your time zone or collect traffic data. Are the cops not searching apple data? Is it just not public enough? Or is the dat…
In theory this data is also available from carriers. But Google can keep record of your gps if you enable that. I think switching to apple is a bit of overreaction over this. You are able to disable location tracking on Google.
Google assistant couldn’t even make a call with the allo app, there were many reasons I switched. Actually I was always and iPhone user and tried pixel 2 for a few month and that was it.