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Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

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Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#311

Post by geofft »

rhizome wrote: post #293
wvenable wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cellular telephone -- they need to know all the cell towers near you and direct your phone between them. It's a rough area but my phone provider definitely knows I'm at work right now.

GP said, "cannot function." How did cellphones work before they came with GPS?

They registered with the nearest cell towers, and ask them to watch signal strength so they can make handover work. This is coarse location information (since the company that runs the cell towers knows where their own cell towers, and uses your current tower registration to figure out which cell tower to send a call to), and can be made a little more fine-grained if you use signal strength from the various towers and triangulate. This does not involve the Global Positioning System or other satellite-based positioning systems at all.

If it does not do this, it is not a cellular phone. There are other types of portable phones that don't work this way, like cordless landline phones (the base doesn't know where it is, just that it's plugged into a phone jack) or satellite phones. But the "cellular" part refers specifically to dividing up the terrain into cells, finding which cell the phone is in, and assigning it to a tower based on that determination.

(This is all pretty irrelevant to the point I was making above that cellular network operators can easily choose not to use the location information or signal strength information for anything other than routing calls, and that deciding that they can just use the information however they want would be creepy.)

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#312

Post by bastijn »

nevi-me wrote: post #296
erispoe wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google Pixel 2 starts at $649. Pixel prices are comparable with iPhones.

I think the point being made is that a once-off amount for the hardware might be way less than what they get to make over those 2 years that you use the device (at least in aggregate as not everyone will buy a Pixel)

Exactly. But only in the case that the vendor already has the channels to turn user data into profit at the scale of Google. Very few other vendors could probably.

Mining your input and serving it to millions scales really well. As long as they can do enough to keep the majority of their users happy enough to continue using the product it is most likely more profitable to get the data than sell the devices given the market for android phones and the position they are in.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#313

Post by ryandrake »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #288
nkurz wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good comment. Might be worth mentioning that turning GPS off reduces the accuracy of your location, but does not prevent it from being known: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google-location... GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device. I'd be surprised that this is true. I used several battery monitor apps on several phones, and never found this to the case. It's a simple receiver, and doesn't re…

>> GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device. Something is, but I find it very hard to believe it's the GPS itself. It's, after all, a completely passive system. What eats battery is transmissions and computation; with GPS, the first doesn't happen, and there isn't much of the second either. I guess what happens is (on some phones; I've kept GPS always active on my Galaxy S4 and S7, and never noticed a differ…

On modern phones, you are unlikely to observe any power savings by turning off GPS or "location services".

The GPS is only going to use significant battery power when it is acquiring or actively calculating fixes. No device or OS vendor would ship software that burns the GPS at all times--your device's battery wouldn't last more than a few hours.

The grandparent is totally incorrect about the GPS being the biggest battery hog on the device. Not even close, unless you are, 24 hours a day, navigating or running some other application that requires continuous (1 second duty cycle) GPS fixes. Even then, your backlight is likely consuming an order of magnitude more power.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#314

Post by DrScump »

jdietrich wrote: post #261
fixermark wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A harder, deeper question, is whether the average user is informed enough about "location history" to know whether they want that on or off, and whose responsibility it should be to inform them. ... as a wise man once observed, people talk a long game about how important their privacy is, but then empirically, researchers continue to discover you can get people to divulge a lot of personal information for a Snickers…

Google are miles ahead of the other big players in terms of transparency and user control. They actively prompt users to review their privacy settings. They provide a plain-English guide to what data they collect and a simple process to choose your privacy settings. I do find Google's level of data collection a bit creepy, but I also don't see how they could reduce the amount of data they collect without reducing the…

  They actively prompt users to review their privacy settings.
And yet I've found with multiple Android updates on multiple devices, they can reset things like Location Services back to "On/Fine" and othere things like enable NFC without telling you that it's happened.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#315

Post by DrScump »

izacus wrote: post #142
daodedickinson wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Default on is outrageous. It's clear the average person doesn't know how to access and manage even some of these settings, much less understand what they do or be able to understand what privacy violations will continue despite turning something off in one place.

You are explicitly asked about that feature when settinng up your phone for the first time.

Many non-technical types just have the store staffer walk through those steps, and others aren't likely to understand the implications of those settings.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#317

Post by jonathanyc »

saulrh wrote: post #42

I'm going to be completely honest here: If these things were behind a configuration option and defaulted to off, I'd have gone into my phone and turned that option on. I want to leave reviews for restaurants as I'm walking out of them - it serves the common good and doing it immediately is better for memory. I want to remember to download offline maps when I'm about to go somewhere where I won't have coverage. My mem…

And I tried to turn the creepy Google Maps prompts off but could not. Why should these be opt-out —- should others be tricked into sacrificing their privacy for your convenience?

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#318

Post by Chaebixi »

rhizome wrote: post #125
someguydave wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times. This information is known to the phone company, at the very least. The phone company almost always records and retains that information. Similarly, you cannot communicate to anyone on the internet without using an IP address, which your counterparty must know and nearly always retains.

Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times. That's like saying a transistor radio needs to know where broadcast antennas are, which is obviously absurd.

> That's like saying a transistor radio needs to know where broadcast antennas are, which is obviously absurd.

Cellphones are called cell phones because they divide the world into location-based cells which determine which antenna your phone talks to. At the very least, the telephone company knows which cell you are located in to communicate with you.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#319

Post by Chaebixi »

dawhizkid wrote: post #6

I think this is called "shadow work"...Google has turned you into a mechanical turk without pay :)

> I think this is called "shadow work"...Google has turned you into a mechanical turk without pay :)

That's an excellent term!

Also, I can't favorite this comment for some reason. The link is missing.

edit: I guess replying fixed it?

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#320

Post by TeMPOraL »

saulrh wrote: post #297
TeMPOraL wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason I choose to describe these systems as prostheses. I choose to describe them as "external brain" ("exobrain" is the term of the art now?) - "prosthesis" feels like it implies there's something wrong with it, and that you use it only because you have no other choice.

On the one hand, that's how I feel about literally everything about myself. There is something wrong with my entire body. I do only use it because I have no better choice. To quote Eliezer Yudkowsky, "I'm sure Einstein was very smart for a human. I'm sure a General Systems Vehicle would think that was very cute of him." Like I said, I'm all aboard the transhumanism train. On the other hand, you're right that most peo…

I'm sorry, I didn't notice until you clarified that you suffer from actual memory issues; I assumed you were just using hyperbole as a rhetorical device. With the context clear, I see why you would want to refer to those tools as prostheses, given that they lift you to (and hopefully above) the "normal" values. And as you say, they indeed perform both augmentative and assistive functions.
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