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Comment by m0dest | Hacker News Reader

I used to willingly enable this and enjoyed this page. But it was recently revealed that Google shares bulk location data with law enforcement, offering the list of all devices that were in a certain area. That was the line for me. Disabled.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/13/us/google-loc...

> The new orders, sometimes called “geofence” warrants, specify an area and a time period, and Google gathers information from Sensorvault about the devices that were there.

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Do you think if you disable this they will not share with law enforcement? I wonder if it makes a difference.

It does make a difference. If you disable it, the data doesn't get stored in the first place, so there's nothing to share.

is this verifiable?

Very little your cell phone is doing is truly verifiable. If you don't trust Google/Apple to not bald-face lie, and privacy is super important to you, toss your phone.

Yes. You can reverse engineer apk-s to see what's going on. (apktool) Or you can inspect the network traffic that goes through your wifi. (mitmproxy + Xposed/JustTrustMe)

By disable, do you mean "pause"? Is there any third-party verification that they aren't storing this data? Are they just not associating it with my account at this time?

How would you know that? My base assumption is to think there’s a possibility that it’s still being tracked in some way.

It makes no different. The data is still logged.

Wasn't there news a few years back that Android Phones uploaded location history happening while "offline" when they finally connected to WiFi; that ended up blamed as "a bug"? OTOH law enforcement has a direct access to baseband modem anyway, so they can triangulate switched off phones with batteries inside, and if those phones have large enough capacitors, even with removed batteries. Having some competent aggregator like Google might be helpful though.

Do you a citation for that? That government had access to the modem and being able to locate switched off phones?

IIRC there was some discussion about it on some Neo900-related forums, but it was a few years I'd looked over there. One of the reasons they had switches for both baseband modem and mic to be sure they aren't powered.

This was discussed a couple months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19653647

My comment on it (expanded a little):

Even without Google or Apple, the police have the cell service providers. In the case of the Austin bomber from a year ago[0], police got cell tower records from the multiple bombings and figured out who was at all the locations. Cell phones are little trackers unless you turn them off or don't carry one.

The police don't need Google or Apple here, the carriers are already tracking who connects to what towers (and I believe they are required to do this by law)

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna85...

Unless you are planning criminal activity in the future, this feature could act as an alibi to absolve you of being in the place where a crime was committed. And, false positives aside, I think it's great that law enforcement has the tools to keep society safe and civil. Law enforcement is not always == bad

>Unless you are planning criminal activity in the future

it's a good thing all laws are just, then, huh?

And that constructing false narratives from meta data isn't a thing

It's nice in theory but can also be helped to convict you if you happen to be near the wrong place at the wrong time. Interesting related video by Law Professor and Police Officer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

Tracking the movements of all citizens is not a compromise that ought to be made to keep society safe. This power can and will be abused to target minority groups (closeted LGBT, minority ethnic groups..). Also in America law enforcement has too many times to count abused their power, and fabricated results from "evidence".

As any lawyer would say: Don't speak to the police, even if you're innocent. Same with this. If I personally want to share my own private tracking data that my lawyer says I can share.. sure. But I do not want this entire data free for law enforcement to see.

I once did an FOIA request and found I was being monitored by the NYPD for being a regular donor to the NYCLU.

Law /enforcement/ isn’t always bad, but mass surveillance of the general populace is.

You have a very naive and sheltered view of the world we live in then.

What I'm hearing is that I should strap this to my dog, and commit a phone-less crime.

That really makes no sense given how easy it would be to fake. You'd have to also prove you had possession of the device at the time.

What I could see happening is the absence of the data becoming a factor for increased scrutiny. Because, of course, if you don't have anything to hide... why did you stop Google from tracking you?

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