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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

#41
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? I remember them disabling search history if you didn't sign in, but not any other critical features. Moreover as I mentioned in my previous comment, only a third has this feature enabled, so whatever feature google is withholding must not be that important to most people.

Search history is a pretty nice feature to lose unless you volunteer to share your information. I had multiple addresses I had to store elsewhere because Maps would purposely forget them.

>Search history is a pretty nice feature to lose unless you volunteer to share your information

I didn't say that you had share location history to get search history, only to sign in. Maybe there was some point in the past where sharing location history was tied to having search history, but I don't remember it, and it's certainly not the case today. If you think that's the case you'll have to provide some third party corroboration.

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

#43
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? I remember them disabling search history if you didn't sign in, but not any other critical features. Moreover as I mentioned in my previous comment, only a third has this feature enabled, so whatever feature google is withholding must not be that important to most people.

Search history is a pretty nice feature to lose unless you volunteer to share your information. I had multiple addresses I had to store elsewhere because Maps would purposely forget them.

I'm confused, there's 3 separate things being talked about in this thread.

You do not have to share your location to store search history.

Maps should not store addresses you search for without you signing in.

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

#44
post #9

Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications. It is meaningless to present an option you are forced to agree to. Additionally there is, to me, a big difference between me enabling an app to use my data for the service I believe it provides and them using it for everything else.

That’s neither here nor there. The question is do you reasonably expect that this information is private. The answer is obviously “no,” because you’re handing the information over to a company with hundreds of thousands of employees. Whether you think you have a good reason to give up your privacy like that or not is neither here nor there.

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

#46

I run GrapheneOS on my phone and have all location permissions denied for everything except for (offline) Organic Maps. I also make it a habit of keeping airplane mode enabled except on the (very) rare occasion when I need to make an outbound phone call while out of the house. With the recent revelations about the triangulated location data that AT&T left exposed for all of its customers I don't feel like this is an…

So you have a mobile phone but you configured it so that you are unreachable when you are not at home?

I'm all for privacy, but people being able to call me is hugely conveninent, and I really don't want to give it up. We need a better solution.

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

#47
post #9

Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications. It is meaningless to present an option you are forced to agree to. Additionally there is, to me, a big difference between me enabling an app to use my data for the service I believe it provides and them using it for everything else.

> Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications We don't have to accept this though, everyone in the modern world makes a choice to accept the implied requirements of being part of the system. We accept the assumption that we are all online, that we all have a mobile phone, and that we all keep up with news and pop culture to an extent that we all seem to zero i…

> Anyone can choose to avoid any one of these parts of the modern world.

Well my apartment building is about to replace the doorbells with a cell phone app (or phone calls as an alternative). No cell phone -> no door bell. I'm just a renter; I get no say in the matter.

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

#48

Google is pushing location data to devices and purging it on servers. From a citation within my comment I’ve cited below: > This change means that Google will no longer respond to geofence warrants from law enforcement that request information on all devices near a particular incident. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40869536 (edit to fix my mistake, thank you Centigonal!)

So I just enabled the "encrypted" backup. The process of doing so is very unintuitive, they have the option in your settings and then tell you go to your timeline settings which leads you back to the same screen telling you to go to timeline settings. Its in another settings tab which isn't exactly straight forwatd.

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

#49
post #44
post #9

Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications. It is meaningless to present an option you are forced to agree to. Additionally there is, to me, a big difference between me enabling an app to use my data for the service I believe it provides and them using it for everything else.

That’s neither here nor there. The question is do you reasonably expect that this information is private. The answer is obviously “no,” because you’re handing the information over to a company with hundreds of thousands of employees. Whether you think you have a good reason to give up your privacy like that or not is neither here nor there.

This is a terrible take. I expect that any such company has more than sufficient wherewithal to enforce good privacy practices on my data, which belongs to me. If they do some calculations on my behalf using that data on their servers, the data still belongs to me.

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

#50
post #6

> Location History is turned off by default, so a user must take several affirmative steps before Google begins tracking and storing his Location History data. Do people really think Google isn't tracking location data without this setting enabled? How would anyone (save for a whistleblower) know? Location history seems like the data Google lets you collect/see for yourself, and not the totality of location data (whi…

> Do people really think Google isn't tracking location data without this setting enabled? How would anyone (save for a whistleblower) know? Frankly I think that Google wont track me if I flip the bit (bugs not withstanding). Maybe I’m a fool. Do I trust mega corps? No, but I trust them enough to not blatantly lie when there’d be huge legal repercussions. They’re a massive corporation with tons of lawyers. They have…

> Ignoring the user would be a massive violation. I’m sure there is massive legal penalty to this, enough to make the company care about being honest.

Is this satire? There are countless discussions about how GDPR for example is not being enforced properly, how fines are not small enough to move the needle for corporations and are just a cost of doing business. Apple and Google and Microsoft and Facebook are continuously fighting the EU Comission about privacy and market domination on multiple fronts, and recently the US DOJ has started fighting them too. I have never seen any clue that they are afraid.

I have no idea what you are talking about.

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