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Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times. This information is known to the phone company, at the very least. The phone company almost always records and retains that information. Similarly, you cannot communicate to anyone on the internet without using an IP address, which your counterparty must know and nearly always retains.

Right, but "to some approximation" is very squishy for the phone company, whereas I got in my car today and the phone told me how long it would take to get to my shrink. It's fairly impressive they could be so tone deaf as to not see why people wouldn't be delighted with this kind of auto-discovery.

Well, it would certainly limit the uncertainty of your location from "anywhere on the planet" to "within a few hundred/thousand meters of this point"

I think that's what I said - I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me?

I am skeptical that your phone provider will hold the extensive information they have on your location in confidence. I'm even more skeptical that the recipients of your IP packets will also hold whatever location information they can infer in confidence.

Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times.

That's like saying a transistor radio needs to know where broadcast antennas are, which is obviously absurd.

Transistor radios are receivers only. Cell phones are transmitters that move between various fixed receiver cells. At the very least the phone company knows what cell any given phone is currently connected to. In practice they know the locations and signal strengths of all the cells in range of the phone, which allows triangulation to within a few dozen meters, at worst.

It's a cellular telephone -- they need to know all the cell towers near you and direct your phone between them. It's a rough area but my phone provider definitely knows I'm at work right now.

GP said, "cannot function." How did cellphones work before they came with GPS?

Your assumption is that GPS is required to know where you are. But each cell tower has a well known physical address and your phone connects to multiple towers making it trivial to triangulate your location. Much less exact than GPS and highly dependent on cell density, etc.

https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC...

But even just the connection cell tower number is enough to determine whether or not you're at home or work.

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 and triangulate. This does not involve the Global Positioning System or other satellite-based positioning systems at all.

If it does not do this, it is not a cellular phone. There are other types of portable phones that don't work this way, like cordless landline phones (the base doesn't know where it is, just that it's plugged into a phone jack) or satellite phones. But the "cellular" part refers specifically to dividing up the terrain into cells, finding which cell the phone is in, and assigning it to a tower based on that determination.

(This is all pretty irrelevant to the point I was making above that cellular network operators can easily choose not to use the location information or signal strength information for anything other than routing calls, and that deciding that they can just use the information however they want would be creepy.)

And that's fine, but none of this addresses the assertion that cellphones can't work without GPS tracking.

GPS tracking is a complete red herring; you're focusing on the wrong thing. No one ever claimed that GPS was necessary. Here's the statement that was made: "Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation)".

That "approximation" is: "Which cell towers can hear your phone transmit, and how strong is the signal?" Your cell phone would work just as well as a phone if you disabled the GPS chip, but your location can be estimated by triangulating from signal strength. It's not nearly as precise, or as accurate, as a GPS-provided location would be, of course.

No one ever claimed that GPS was necessary

The context of this thread is Android and Apple's tracking of location history and I'm just trying to stay on topic. Not without downvotes, natch.

This isn't Reddit, I'm not an idiot, and I know how cellphones work. Try to be more charitable.

> 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.

Not GPS tracking. Simply tracking the fact that you transmitted a signal to a particular cell tower (the one nearby in radio terms) is sufficient to narrow your location considerably.

No such assertion was made.

> That's like saying a transistor radio needs to know where broadcast antennas are, which is obviously absurd.

Cellphones are called cell phones because they divide the world into location-based cells which determine which antenna your phone talks to. At the very least, the telephone company knows which cell you are located in to communicate with you.

What controls does an iPhone give me that I do not get on Android?

Google gives me a dashboard with everything laid out they track and not aware of anything like that from Apple?

I am probably unusual as love the data as need to refer to it to remember stuff for expense reports and such. We also have Google homes in our house and GW and I carry a pixel 2 XL and an iPhone but feel like Google is properly giving me a choice.

Btw, it is next to impossible to cancel our cable but Google procatively gives me a link to what they track and make it very easy to delete if I desire.

Why do you think whether your phone asks you if you want to send a restaurant review is in any way related to whether your phone provider is using your location data maliciously?

In fact if there's any relation wouldn't it be the reverse? If you're using the location data unethically, you wouldn't want to draw attention to the fact that it's being gathered.

I don't think that - the behavior I object to is not solely behavior that the provider thinks is malicious / unethical. The roommate in my example who barges in on my phone calls could believe they were genuinely contributing to whatever conversation I was having on the phone and helping me out, but they would still be creepy.

So I don't see this as about whether the provider has "good" or "bad" intentions; I see this as about whether the provider asks me for permission/consent before using my data. It's certainly theoretically possible that a provider is good at talking the talk and also being actively malicious, by asking for permission and then ignoring it or something, but that's not the problem I have or the article's author has with Google.

It does seem like that is the problem a lot of people have.

Google does explicitly ask you for permission to do this. And whenever someone in this thread points that out, someone replies with some variation of "yeah, but they probably do it anyway". Well...OK then I guess. There's not much of a conversation that can happen after that, but you do you.

I explicitly and repeatedly try to deny Google access to my location. I still get requests for reviews of places I've just visited, suggestions to make my photos public, notifications of the traffic on my way home, and so on.

My location history is blank, and set not to gather more data, but I still got those notifications, until I turned them off earlier today. I suspect that one of the times I turned on location, that it asked to also "activate Google Location Services to improve accuracy", or something.

> someone replies with some variation of "yeah, but they probably do it anyway".

My variation is "I've checked the 3 places I know to look, and I'll have to watch the New Features lists of future OS releases to find all of the things I'd like to opt out of."

> and certainly there is nothing in the iPhone ecosystem where they want you to contribute reviews or human analysis to help them with gathering data

... but as a result, they are, perhaps, unable to deliver the product Google can. Consider [https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat; previously discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653]

... which is fine; Apple doesn't need to be in the business of providing the best mapping software available on a smartphone. But Google appears to be in that business.

I don't understand how "knowing" your location data is violating your privacy. If you visit an adult site, and the adult site "knows" you're on there, is that violating your privacy? Obviously not. What would be violating your privacy is if it publicly told everyone about that data.

Unless you can find concrete evidence that Google publicly and directly makes this data available to others, how is this a violating of your privacy? In using the device with the GPS enabled, you are agreeing that the device can know and use this data.

> In using the device with the GPS enabled, you are agreeing that the device can know and use this data.

Why am I agreeing to that? For what purposes can they use the data?

As in your example - it's not about whether they know the data, it's about what they do with the data and whether they have my permission to do things with it. It is obvious to me that a website has permission to send reply packets to my IP. It's somewhat obvious that it has permission to keep short-term logs for technical debugging, with strict access controls and audits (stricter if it's something like an adult site that would be embarrassing/sensitive if it leaked). It's definitely not obvious that they have permission to share the IP internally for the employees' amusement, even leaving aside external sharing.

It's the same with location services on my phone - it's obvious that if I have GPS on, and I open the map app of my choice, and it says "This app would like your location" and I say yes, I want that app to have my location. It's also obvious that I want the cell phone towers to be able to route calls to me. It's not obvious that I want the company that happens to write my phone's OS to use my data for marketing / profit purposes.