71–80 of 172 posts
What is new is that users can opt-out of location tracking. They won't purge SensorVault though (location reporting).
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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…
i was worried also that airplane mode may not actually disable the radio but at least one random google result (from reddit, not graphene themselves) says it does.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1/3 of active google users is a lot of people to opt into giving away their privacy. Either they actually don't understand what they did, understand but were forced in some way or understand and truly believe the value of the service was worth the privacy invasion. It is pure speculation on my part but my guess is that the first two reasons dwarf the third. The decision in question though would, in my view, only have…
Have you considered the possibility that the average person doesn't care that much about privacy? That's entirely consistent with other things you can observe, like the lack of response to the Snowden leaks, or how commonly excuses like "nothing to hide" are invoked.
I have. I considered it in depth and did a good deal of psychological research on it. Then I went out onto the street and asked people; dozens and dozens of ordinary people, old, young, rich, poor...
Result: People really care about privacy.
You can read all about it in the podcast and blog I am not allowed to mention here.
What you're alluding to I think is the idea that people do not fully understand the link between technology and privacy violation.
Our view here is also biased. The idea that "people don't care that much about privacy" naturally gets bandied around amongst developers for whom profitable software designs do violate people's privacy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1/3 of active google users is a lot of people to opt into giving away their privacy. Either they actually don't understand what they did, understand but were forced in some way or understand and truly believe the value of the service was worth the privacy invasion. It is pure speculation on my part but my guess is that the first two reasons dwarf the third. The decision in question though would, in my view, only have…
Do you carry a smartphone?
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!)
The actual accuracy is worse than before but it’s a welcome change. They do still offer a way to keep an encrypted backup of the database on Google servers (so you don’t lose it if you lose your phone) but its disabled by default and it doesn’t even have a modal popup making it easy to enable backups, you have to specifically click the UI button to see the modal with the info sheet and a button to enable backing it u…
Can someone explain why it's good that your official law infrastructure has no access to Google when in need?
Is this some kind of bizzaro-extermist-libertarianism "government is evil" from America again?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1/3 of active google users is a lot of people to opt into giving away their privacy. Either they actually don't understand what they did, understand but were forced in some way or understand and truly believe the value of the service was worth the privacy invasion. It is pure speculation on my part but my guess is that the first two reasons dwarf the third. The decision in question though would, in my view, only have…
Have you considered the possibility that the average person doesn't care that much about privacy? That's entirely consistent with other things you can observe, like the lack of response to the Snowden leaks, or how commonly excuses like "nothing to hide" are invoked.
it's not that they don't care - they didnt think they need to care. There's a big difference. Implicit trust in the data usage is the key here.
On the one hand, this implicit trust means the customer is a really good one. But abuses of this trust is inevitable imho, and eventually, it will be made public if it happened. Only then, will those average person actually reveal their real preference - that they do care!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The actual accuracy is worse than before but it’s a welcome change. They do still offer a way to keep an encrypted backup of the database on Google servers (so you don’t lose it if you lose your phone) but its disabled by default and it doesn’t even have a modal popup making it easy to enable backups, you have to specifically click the UI button to see the modal with the info sheet and a button to enable backing it u…
> a welcome change Can someone explain why it's good that your official law infrastructure has no access to Google when in need? Is this some kind of bizzaro-extermist-libertarianism "government is evil" from America again?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The actual accuracy is worse than before but it’s a welcome change. They do still offer a way to keep an encrypted backup of the database on Google servers (so you don’t lose it if you lose your phone) but its disabled by default and it doesn’t even have a modal popup making it easy to enable backups, you have to specifically click the UI button to see the modal with the info sheet and a button to enable backing it u…
> a welcome change Can someone explain why it's good that your official law infrastructure has no access to Google when in need? Is this some kind of bizzaro-extermist-libertarianism "government is evil" from America again?