Apple is fixing this in iOS 14. It allows you to give an app access to only approximate location. Note that if your location history (precise every five minute location stored to your account) is off, Google won't even suggest a locally-stored list of previous locations you used with Maps. Which is an absolutist position that is usability-wise incredibly frustrating.
> Apple is fixing this in iOS 14. It allows you to give an app access to only approximate location. I would rather have the ability give a custom location instead.
XPrivacyLua for Android supports this. (Requires root and Xposed framework, though.)
You could make the same argument about different subject areas in a newspaper; saying that the different editors are antagonistic towards each other, and have varying levels of competence. In the cases of both newspapers and governments, there is a similar oversight and management structure across the organization, as well as unity in source of funding. Perhaps we should expect different parts of the government to ac…
I think we'll need to agree to disagree about the government's organization then. A newspaper is a far more cohesive organization that exists to a single end and has a largely uniform consistency, regardless of the beliefs of individual editors. > I think the government organizations attempting to ensure backdoors in encryption are acting deceitfully, malevolently, and incompetently, with the stated motive of easing…
My view on privacy is simply that it's too important to trust to the government. If we care about what a web browser sends out, it's a problem that should be solved by the browser, not the government. You don't trust the government to ensure the privacy of your communications; you shouldn't trust them to ensure your privacy in any other respect.
These dark patterns around location tracking was what finally made me give up on Android. I knew Google tracked location even when the location setting was turned off, so I had App & Web activity disabled. As Google bricked more and more functionality to dis-incentivize disabling that setting, they dis-incentivized me right off the Android platform and off of the rest of their services. They did me a favor, really. I…
Apple is fixing this in iOS 14. It allows you to give an app access to only approximate location. Note that if your location history (precise every five minute location stored to your account) is off, Google won't even suggest a locally-stored list of previous locations you used with Maps. Which is an absolutist position that is usability-wise incredibly frustrating.
> Apple is fixing this in iOS 14. It allows you to give an app access to only approximate location. I would rather have the ability give a custom location instead.
I used to be pretty much in favour of opt-out for stuff like this, but I think at this point the industry itself has managed to prove that it can’t be trusted with anything but legislation guaranteeing opt-in.
I hope said legislation is better thought out than the opt-in cookie laws.
Absent legislation, I'm all for a "nuke it all" approach when it comes to ad-blocking and tracker-blocking. It won't catch everything, especially platform-level privacy concerns like this, but it does move good usable defaults over to the user's control. No need to rely on companies who continue to fail to act in good faith.
You can't block an app or site from accessing your geolocatable IP workout extreme measures.
But IP geolocation has pretty bad resolution. Generally, it can reliably locate country, but rest is a wild guess. E.g. my IP is geolocated to city 300km away (as that is where my ISP has business address).
> Apple is fixing this in iOS 14. It allows you to give an app access to only approximate location. I would rather have the ability give a custom location instead.
1. Download a GPS spoofing app 2. Enable Developer options 3. Select mock location app 4. Spoof your location
Maybe people could just live with having to search: " near " if they want to get geographically relevant results. It doesn't seem that terrible to me.
That's terrible for usability, especially since you're almost always going to want better resolution than "anywhere in or around city X".
Maybe you should have to opt-in to handing over all your data, and users who value "usability" over privacy can make an informed choice for themselves.
This quote basically disproves the phrase Sundar repeatedly parroted to Congressional members about making it easy for people to configure their privacy settings. You can bet this quote is going to be read to his face if there's another hearing. The author of the statement was redacted in the public version, but my bet is if that is still a current employee, they won't be for much longer. Because this quote is going…
Yes, because most users will want low latency more than they want a hard-to-geolocate IPv6 address; IOW they will just use the IPv6 addresses their ISP assigns them, which will be easy to geolocate even without the ISP's explicit cooperation. Worse still, because IPv6 promises to eliminate NAT, geolocation will likely become even more precise as user devices will have global addresses that they are not sharing with a…
How can per-device IPv6 addresses alone enable better tracking if they’re long-lived and the device moves physical locations during that time? How would a tracker with only IP address know that the device moved?