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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

#321
post #5

Is 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.

There is an open source iOS app called Overland[0] that can continuously track your location history in the background and upload the data to an arbitrary endpoint as GeoJSON.

The "protocol" consists of a single HTTP request and response, so you can easily write your own server software to store the data however you want, which is what I did.

If you don't want to write your own backend, you can also just use the server software[1] the author of the app uses, which is also open source.

[0]: https://github.com/aaronpk/Overland-iOS [1]: https://github.com/aaronpk/Compass

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

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how the pandemic has changed people's political views in various directions. Personally I've become more anti-authoritarian, on the political compass I've moved a few points further down and slightly to the left (based on the UK Overton window) while also adopting stronger views on constitutionalism and the seperation of powers. I've also become a lot more pessimistic about the power of institutions…

>I'm very much now "I'm more than happy to pay taxes for better social services, but please keep the clumsy, oafish hands of the state out of my personal life before it does any more damage". This is very much a stance of "oafish hands for thee, but none for me." The same institutional mass of "oafish hands" that interferes in your personal life does the same to everyone engaging with social services. And while , in…

>the market equivalents/alternatives will, over time, be weakened or killed the same way as you would see with any other deep-pocketed firm selling a product for below-market prices, at a loss, to smoke out smaller competitors.

What market equivalents are you talking about exactly? The examples you mentioned are hardly the results of "oafish hands".

Marriage? The free market has run amok with building an entire industry and "chic" around large elaborate marriage ceremonies, replete with gratuitous mark ups on relatively everyday services. As far as the institution goes, marriage in the colloquial sense is fine. Couples form and union all the time. Legally speaking, you may have a point, but I've always held the State being involved with marriage in anything more than a record keeping capacity, and acting as a neutral arbiter of inheritance, dissolution, or adoption/parental status quo setting is a terrible idea. As an example, the practice of not getting on paper married for the benefit of welfare or food stamp eligibility is one such example.

>Bulldozing of poor neighborhoods for car dependent housing projects

Welcome to real estate as investment, and the tendency of all idle capital to seek forms that facilitate rent extraction. The lack of "public transit" has more to do with the fact that nobody wants to be burdened with actually giving up a piece of their pie for it, but expects everyone else to. The only "oafish hands" there are the councils who are continually courted by moneyed interests in the free market.

>Healthcare

Welcome to insurance in a nutshell. It completely destroys any semblance of coupling between producer and consumer of service; but is also the inevitable out one of a "captive" consumer population. The combination of service provider cartelry, consolidation of insurers, and perverse incentives created by the free market in terms of businesses becoming targets for Investment funds; it's really the market you should be blaming there.

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

#323

Rant: Ugh. People still don't grok the privacy situation wrt law enforcement. Here's me trying yet again trying to convey my understanding. Our prior legal notions are moot when the "dragnet" is the entire planet, encompassing all people for all space and time. Folk understanding of legal notions like probable cause, reasonable doubt, burden of proof, innocent until proven guilty, alibis, etc. no longer apply. Identi…

You are not insane.

The part you have trouble articulating I think revolves around 3rd Party Doctrine, and the complete seeming death of professional discretion. When I was growing up, you wanted to keep records? Paper, or get out. So people only tracked the important things. Queries happened at the speed of a human being able to synthesize information, etc. Further, if you wanted to cross-reference different sources, you were doing footwork, which meant you were doing that one thing at a time.

Nowadays, we've massively parallelized the data collection, classification, cleaning, organizing, and cross-referencing to the degree that about the only thing standing in your way is learning the names of providers with the juiciest datasets.

The Internet did it's original job maybe a bit too well. Information is propagated without any sense of discretion in the name of financial viability.

Walking things back... Well... The only option is to destroy the data itself. By it's very existence, by collecting it, it destroys any semblance of privacy.

Cellular technology in particular is a glaring example of a set of data that never should have been made queryable, but here we are.

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

#324
post #129

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…

4. Replace your Android device with an iPhone.

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

#325
post #191

I think crimination of nearly all abortion is a good thing, cause an abortion is a murder.

You've been repeatedly breaking the site guidelines by using HN for ideological battle. We ban such accounts, regardless of the ideology they favor, so please stop. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#326

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.

It must be someone else because Eric Schmidt’s quote was more akin to victim blaming: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...

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