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No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data

fourthamendment.com

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Re: No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data

#131

Post by pbhjpbhj »

coldtea wrote: post #106
ajb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistically, you can't rely on having a non-repressive government for your entire lifetime. The US has been fortunate in missing out on it for quite a while, but even then there has been HUAC and J Edgar Hoover, even if they didn't take over the whole government.

Not just those, the goverment has been historically repressive of many minorities, using the police to do this, from blacks to native americans, labour advocates, activists, and other categories, that's not confined to the HUAC and Hoover era.

Isn't that just showing that repression is orthogonal to ability to track people? A database of movements easily clears many people who might be falsely accused and also highlights crimes of false accusation allowing removal of perversions of justice. Of course it needn't be used that way, if you put {or don't prevent} the immoral/criminal in power then they'll do immoral/criminal things whether they have access to citizens movements or not.

Elect trustworthy people first.

If you don't start there we're all screwed... but a large number seem to elect 'people who'd sell their grandma to make a nickel'.

Re: No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data

#132

Post by UncleEntity »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #128
ajb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistically, you can't rely on having a non-repressive government for your entire lifetime. The US has been fortunate in missing out on it for quite a while, but even then there has been HUAC and J Edgar Hoover, even if they didn't take over the whole government.

This is 'drunk-driving kills so we should ban vehicles' level thinking. If you don't want fascists then vote/act against that. You can't avoid fascists by making it harder to catch criminals for non-fascists. Then you get "well at least the fascists keep crime rates down".

If the ruling party has the ability to suppress dissenting views and the means to target people doing something completely lawful like attending a political rally then how, exactly, does one "vote/act against that"?

Maybe it's easier to just not give them the power in the first place?

Re: No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data

#133

Post by pbhjpbhj »

tomcam wrote: post #104
epigramx wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a welcome change Can someone explain why it's good that your official law infrastructure has no access to Google when in need? Is this some kind of bizzaro-extermist-libertarianism "government is evil" from America again?

Is it your thought that government agencies are generally competent and respectful of your data? Do you think the kind of people who run bureaucracies with zero accountability are likely to keep your info private?

>bureaucracies with zero accountability //

This seems an entirely different argument - the whole point of using movement data is to increase accountability. Why, excepting being immoral, wouldn't those supporting it agree to higher levels of accountability?

Re: No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data

#134

Post by UncleEntity »

willcipriano wrote: post #107
coldtea wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just those, the goverment has been historically repressive of many minorities, using the police to do this, from blacks to native americans, labour advocates, activists, and other categories, that's not confined to the HUAC and Hoover era.

Oppression of minorities is really just the outcome of democracy on long enough time scales. Run a democracy long enough and you'll have the boot of 51% of the population on the other 49.

Which, ironically, is a very good argument in favor of the 2nd Amendment...

Re: No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data

#135

Post by skybrian »

dmantis wrote: post #100
epigramx wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a welcome change Can someone explain why it's good that your official law infrastructure has no access to Google when in need? Is this some kind of bizzaro-extermist-libertarianism "government is evil" from America again?

Because law enforcement must be costly and non-automated to avoid the unbalanced power distribution between an individual and the gov, which only serves the individual and not rules them. A cost to catch a criminal should be a manual and expensive work from an agent and thus provide no ability to mass abuse human rights on scale. Only on actual criminals when needed.

This is something often implied but rarely stated, so thanks for spelling it out.

But I don’t think it’s an inherent tradeoff? In theory, anyway, the police work for us. They’re spending taxpayer money. It’s expensive. If there’s a way of making them more efficient then we should want them to use it. Maybe there are ways?

This doesn’t mean skimping on necessary safeguards, but that doesn’t mean we need to put up unnecessary obstacles about knowing where to look. We should still want them to win at finding criminals and we don’t want “game balance” because it’s not a game.

Catching the bad guys and not prosecuting the wrong people both involve having more accurate information. Bad information means more mistakes.

It doesn’t mean just trusting them. Defense attorneys, judges, and juries benefit from better information, too.

Re: No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data

#136

Post by ramses0 »

inejge wrote: post #55
kibwen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an overreaction. The idea of everyone willingly sharing the details of their every movement with sociopathic corporations who are beholden to national security letters would have been met with ridicule 30 years ago.

I don't think that actual history supports that assertion. 30 years ago, cellular networks were really taking off and people were starting to use mobile phones en masse. Always on, pinging the base stations, delivering that data to equally sociopathic and beholden carriers. The public was not up in arms. What's changed in the meantime, aside from the richness and granularity of location data, is awareness of the pote…

No. The _ability_ to exploit it "en-masse" didn't exist 30 years ago. Random dell advertisement shows 16mb RAM (max 64mb), and 450mb HD. https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/49o9tm/dell_opti...

Keep in mind, these are Mb, not Gb!

Nowadays with a raspberry pi and a 128gb SD card you can go to town on "all location data for the last year for all American cell phones".

Back in 1994, even coordinating reliable central writes of all that location data would have been extraordinarily complicated, and there was not yet a panopticon appetite that would attempt the endeavor without a heavily funded psychopath behind it.

As "we the industry" have gotten more capable (and comfortable) processing huge quantities of data (eg: post map-reduce), and the hardware requirements have fallen to "my cell phone could compute it in an hour", the risk has increased tremendously.

Same story with muskets, cannons and tanks vs AK-47's. "Gun Control" in the musket era is materially different than an era of AK-47's and drones. Same with data processing.

Re: No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data

#137

Post by coldtea »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #131
coldtea wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just those, the goverment has been historically repressive of many minorities, using the police to do this, from blacks to native americans, labour advocates, activists, and other categories, that's not confined to the HUAC and Hoover era.

Isn't that just showing that repression is orthogonal to ability to track people? A database of movements easily clears many people who might be falsely accused and also highlights crimes of false accusation allowing removal of perversions of justice. Of course it needn't be used that way, if you put {or don't prevent} the immoral/criminal in power then they'll do immoral/criminal things whether they have access to c…

>Isn't that just showing that repression is orthogonal to ability to track people?

No, it just shows that you can repress even with less ability to track people (a fact nobody doubted. The Romans could repress people too and they didn't have mass surveillance).

It, however, absolutely doesn't refute the point that with more ability to track people you can repress more, more effectively, and in novel ways.

>Elect trustworthy people first.

Popular pressure (and even ocassional popular revolt), separation of powers, and various established checks and balances are there precisely so you don't have to depend on electing trustworthy people.

Of course if we could somehow magically only be electing trustworthy people, we wouldn't need to have this discussion (or have these problems).

Re: No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data

#138

Post by [deleted] »

modeless wrote: post #52
judge2020 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual accuracy is worse than before but it’s a welcome change. They do still offer a way to keep an encrypted backup of the database on Google servers (so you don’t lose it if you lose your phone) but its disabled by default and it doesn’t even have a modal popup making it easy to enable backups, you have to specifically click the UI button to see the modal with the info sheet and a button to enable backing it u…

Thank you for posting this. I had no idea that there was a default off option to keep encrypted backups. I would be pretty mad if I lost all my years of timeline data because I switched phones. It's ridiculous that Google didn't even show an option for this in the long and needlessly convoluted migration process.

[deleted]

Re: No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data

#139

Post by Brian_K_White »

barroomhero wrote: post #123
jffry wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's similar to the Android app. If so: 1. Open Google Maps 2. Tap my profile photo at top right 3. Pick "Your Timeline" from the menu 4. Tap the cloud icon in top navbar 5. Toggle the option to enable cloud backup

I'm using Android and do not have the cloud icon? Can you share a screenshot?

Screenshot would show the users current location, and would not tell you anything that the directions didn't tell you. I followed the directions in that comment and confirm that I see what is described. A cloud icon in a top nav bar, on the right side, with a slash through it in my case as backup sync is off.

Re: No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data

#140

Post by jffry »

barroomhero wrote: post #123
jffry wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's similar to the Android app. If so: 1. Open Google Maps 2. Tap my profile photo at top right 3. Pick "Your Timeline" from the menu 4. Tap the cloud icon in top navbar 5. Toggle the option to enable cloud backup

I'm using Android and do not have the cloud icon? Can you share a screenshot?

Sure. Here's a screenshot when I have timeline view open (zoomed onto an ocean, that's why it's all blue): https://i.imgur.com/Yx9eBIg.png

The cloud had a slash through it, I tapped it and enabled the setting.

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