371–380 of 399 posts
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Google has much more to gain with mining your data as they have the channels to turn it into profit. Apple has a better chance making profit from their devices than their users data.
But is that a chicken or the egg? Apple never developed the channels because of their focus on privacy when they could have easily done so.
Serious question for the HN community - why do you leave your GPS on/activated by default? I have mine disabled unless I specifically need it for something, which is rare. Usually the only time I ever need GPS is for driving instructions. Otherwise, it's off. GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device. Why would you leave this on? Do you all use it far more frequently or was it something you never thought to s…
How do you measure this? At least on the android devices I've used I've never seen a line item in any metrics that shows GPS as a thing, at all, nor have I noticed any location based app being generally in the top 5.
For me the battery consumer is screen time.
As to why I leave it on, I like it - I like the hot notices about things in my area, and I use navigation quite a lot as Waze's traffic re-routing ability is useful to me.
It's amazing - people like different things!
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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 an…
And that's fine, but none of this addresses the assertion that cellphones can't work without GPS tracking.
Perhaps because that was never asserted.
> Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times.
Serious question for the HN community - why do you leave your GPS on/activated by default? I have mine disabled unless I specifically need it for something, which is rare. Usually the only time I ever need GPS is for driving instructions. Otherwise, it's off. GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device. Why would you leave this on? Do you all use it far more frequently or was it something you never thought to s…
If I was designing this feature, I'd use GPS in combination with the MAC address of the wireless AP in the restaurant; I wouldn't be surprised if this works with just WiFi enabled.
Serious question for the HN community - why do you leave your GPS on/activated by default? I have mine disabled unless I specifically need it for something, which is rare. Usually the only time I ever need GPS is for driving instructions. Otherwise, it's off. GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device. Why would you leave this on? Do you all use it far more frequently or was it something you never thought to s…
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…
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Travel guides have been a thing for a very long time
But that's just another memory surrogate...
Smartphones have just made them a one-stop shop for all our external thinking now.
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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…
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But is that a chicken or the egg? Apple never developed the channels because of their focus on privacy when they could have easily done so.
That was all under Jobs. How much longer will they keep that position?
https://www.apple.com/privacy/ wasn't a URL until around 2010. Jobs died in 2011 and back then the page was just a Privacy Policy. Around 2014, they moved their privacy policy page and replaced it with a letter from Tim Cook which puts in writing that they don't monetize user data (if I remember correctly, this was in response to iCloud data breaches). In late 2017 they replaced it again with kind of a product page highlighting privacy.
Since Jobs has passed, they've move away from defaulting to a 4-digit code, encrypted phone backups in the cloud, moved from 2-step to 2-factor id, added a secure co-processor (with touch-id), made numerous moves to disable tracking cookies in their browser. From my observations about Apple, if they don't care about something it stagnates or goes away. All of those requires research, put more onus on the user, or cost Apple more per device.
Trust is a funny thing and I think it's much easier to lose than to gain. So they could move in another direction in the future, but so far it seems like they're continuing with a focus on user privacy.
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> Why? Well, the problem with Google is they have an incentive to do bad things to us, simply because we are not the real customer. I am one of Google's real customers, I bought an expensive phone from them, but, to quote Josh Marshall: > One thing I’ve observed with Google over the years is that it is institutionally so used to its ‘customers’ actually being its products that when it gets into businesses where it ac…
You're equating different things You paid real money for the hardware.. You have paid 0 for the use of Google's servers and their software. E.g. you enjoy their Maps app, you enjoy seeing real time traffic. You enjoy using Keep and let them host all your memos on it. You enjoy Photos and like that all your pics are in the 'cloud'. You enjoy...... You paid real money for the hardware yes, and it works with ur without…
> unfortunately you aren't the customer, although you might feel differently and they've definitely marketed things in a misleading way.
That's a false distinction. I paid for the product, which includes the hardware and the software they decided to integrate. I'm their customer. However, Google will still try to trick me into shadow-working for them and give me no help when their system misbehaves, because they don't know how to deal with human user-customers.
Basically, not that "I'm not a customer" it's that Google treats its customers badly.