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Comment by novok | Hacker News Reader

The alert is annoying although for apps you want to have always on location tracking although, like some life logging apps. (Arc, etc)

It's like OS doesn't want to accept there are apps you want always on location tracking on and for it to stop annoying you about it.

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This might be a necessary evil. If you could turn it off (even in a convoluted way), people would do it - which is what led to the issue of such a large proportion of Americans having their location data streamed 24/7 in the first place.

Unlike Windows 10 updates not giving people a choice in the matter, this only helps you, so I really don't see the problem here.

No, it does not "only help me". My attention is finite, and spurious warnings waste it. Constant unwanted nagging is paternalistic and disrespectful of the user's time.

I have several apps with always-on location permissions and I must have seen maybe half a dozen of these alerts since I installed iOS 13 back in the fall. It's nowhere near "constant unwanted nagging".

Yeah, I'm a little annoyed that there isn't an option for "no really, always allow". I understand that there's good privacy reasons to keep asking -- but I'm quite aware that a weather app will need access to my location, and I'm okay with that.

Wonder if we’ll see a shift to legit location aware apps that then leak tracking data

Are a weather app’s ads more valuable now because it gets more users to track location

That's how it works in Android. Per app, you can set to Always allow location, Always deny location, or Allow only when app is in use.

You can choose the weather location manually. I have a list of cities and default to the one I live in. There’s absolutely no reason for the weather app to know my location down to the square metre.

When you choose a weather location manually, you actually get a less fine-grained report than the one you get from a GPS-resolved location. Basically, you get weather for "the closest weather station to the geographic centre of the named city" rather than "the closest weather station to you."

This can be a big deal if your city has a large altitude range, such that going a few miles east means the difference between clouds vs. fog, or rain vs. snow; or if your city is coastal, such that going a few miles inland can mean rain vs. sun, and can make a dozen degrees' difference in temperature. (And, in some cities, you have both problems. Yay Vancouver!)

Why not use a ZIP/postal code?

In the case where you never go anywhere, how is that different from giving them your precise location? They very likely know enough other things about you to deanonymize a postal code into your actual address.

In the case where you do go places, the difference is that you get a weather report for where you are, rather than where you live. When I'm at my girlfriend's house, and I check the weather report, I want to know what the weather's going to be like tomorrow at my girlfriend's house, not at my house. And when I'm at the office and considering where to go for lunch, I want to know whether it's going to be raining at noon in the area of town around my office.

My ZIP code has a 4,000ft altitude change. Weather at the top is very different from the bottom.

you sir are a corner case.

Coquitlam has a report. And the weather predictions are quantized to a certain cell size. And in coquitlam, why bother. It’s all just rain :P

There’s two apps in germany that broadcast warnings of either dangerous weather conditions or other incidents (major fire or similar). I can configure both with a fixed location, but this is really a case where I want the app to geolocate me and warn me about dangers around where I am currently.

We get dangerous ones like tornado sent as part of Emergency broadcast. Snowfall warnings and thunderstorms warning are sent without geolocation as well.

There is an Always option. It just doesn’t show on the pop up. But if you go to settings -> privacy -> location services you see a list of apps, and if the app registers for always, it will have that option

But iOS still occasionally double-checks. Not frequently, but if you have enough apps that you allow to always track you, the notifications might add up enough to be annoying.

Except, most weather apps including the Weather Channel App sell your location data to hedge funds.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/loca...

> The Weather Channel app, owned by an IBM subsidiary, told users that sharing their locations would let them get personalized local weather reports. IBM said the subsidiary, the Weather Company, discussed other uses in its privacy policy and in a separate “privacy settings” section of the app. Information on advertising was included there, but a part of the app called “location settings” made no mention of it.

> The app did not explicitly disclose that the company had also analyzed the data for hedge funds — a pilot program that was promoted on the company’s website. An IBM spokesman said the pilot had ended. (IBM updated the app’s privacy policy on Dec. 5, after queries from The Times, to say that it might share aggregated location data for commercial purposes such as analyzing foot traffic.)

I have to admit this annoyed me as well, they should change it to the notifications that just exist on your lock screen or as a banner.

It's started to frustrate me when I've just unlocked my phone to call or reply to someone and I get hit with a forced notification I must respond to about location tracking for an application that I absolutely do want location tracking set for.

In my experience, the OS prompts you less and less frequently if you keep approving it. I have one app I give background access for and at this point I'm getting maybe one prompt per month.

They just need a "don't ask me again about this app" option. I'm surprised they don't have that already.

This can be exploited by Shitbook and the likes. Messenger for example displays a fake notifications prompt with an arrow pointing to the "Allow" button and the only way to proceed is to tap the allow button, at which point they'll call the real OS-provided notifications prompt (which looks just like the fake one) and hope you also click allow on that one (of course the real one can be denied but unless you're tech-savvy you wouldn't even notice/understand what just happened or how a company could be so nasty to be pulling tricks like this).

Is there anything like Arc for android?

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