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Comment by pgeorgi | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but not through GPS, or the location information compiled about my logins would be way more accurate than it is (often off by 100-200 km in any direction). Probably IP based geo location (that would naturally trigger with VPNs that give you an IP in $whereever).

That has nothing to do with the GPS setting of your phone.

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That's picking a nit. GP or whatever said "GPS", but does it matter which technology is used to track your location? Clearly not. And many users say "GPS" to mean all location technologies too, so this doesn't seem like a useful nit to pick, honestly.

Every time you load a web page they can see your IP address, and IP addresses can be mapped back to rough locations. Sometimes people use "GPS" to also include things like your phone figuring out where it is based on what WiFi names it can see, but I don't think I've ever seen it for IP-based geolocation.

(Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Google)

Right. There's the IP address, cell tower location, wifi name location, and GPS. People don't care which it is, except they want it (because then they want precision).

Stop communicating silently with your servers. Do it. Ask for each and every call to them unless the communication is already confirmed by users. Make all http* communication go trough http proxy which logs all the traffic in clearly visible form and only than make https. Show the data sent, make google play and framework open source. Enable users to see your hidden syncs (oh yeah those with asterisks infront (you DO know about them, right?) and disable them and keep their settings after updates instead of resetting them. Explain why with microg, the battery and network usage drops for 1/3. And I am not using any of your "services", no maps, no gmail, dns (oh yeah my rom is modified, a lot) nothing. Stop bubbling! Stop corelating order of pages visited to fingerprint users (and I know you are doing this), stop using cell towers to get location even if gps is turned off. Stop giving ISPs your boxes which makes spying on users local on ISP level.

Either you have no clue about what is going on in your company or you are here as a PR guy.

I really hope that GDPR will hit you hard, as far as I am concerned you are far worse than Facebook, more harmfull than Monsanto, you have opened Pandoras box of user tracking and becoase of you now every single company is doing it. And just so you know, by writting this, my karma will fall for at least 10 points as your fanbase (which typically doesnt even understand what I have written) will downvote me a lot. I am telling you this just for you to understand how very pissed off on behaviour of your company some people are. The only thing that is into your favor was actually your biggest mistake - you have mistakenly made android open source which makes it far more feasible to silence it down to the point where it no longer communicates with your domains. This was maybe when you were still having the "don't be evil" attitude, at least as form of PR.

The complaint above was about login screens "knowing" about people's locations.

When you log in to a service (eg. Google), the device doesn't "silently" communicate with the servers, you asked it to. It sends a request with credentials, as it should. That request naturally comes with an IP address, which can be mapped to a rough location with no further information by the client.

Yeah but the rant was in form: "so what, you are inviding users privacy on so many levels that it doesn't matter if login screens know about your location". And I have barely started.

I don't think anyone mentioned anything about GPS until now. We're talking about Google recording your location, which can be inferred from a number of sources, including GPS, WiPS/WFPS, IP, and others. WiPS/WFPS is the most commonly used by Google.

The great-grand-poster:

"Android even lets you turn off AGPS, which collects anonymous location data to update itself. As far as I know, this is not even possible on iOS."

AGPS is GPS, assisted but still GPS.

I guess I was unclear: that could probably be reworded to say "I don't think anyone specified GPS"

That ggp prefixed that line on AGPS with "even"; they were asking for citation that Google persistently tracks location, and just used AGPS as one example.

The point being, saying Google allows you to disable GPS is a world away from saying Google allows you to disable location tracking. And I'm not talking about IP geolocation.

I don't even know if they do completely respect your choice to disable GPS (citation needed indeed here), but I do know that they persistently track you via WiPS/WFPS at the very least, if not other methods.

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