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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

You know your phone service provider has that location information in resolution that’s almost as good, right?

The only way to opt out is to turn your phone off (equivalently, leave it at home).

For some people, the fact that google also knows it is no big deal. For some it is. But if you are worried about your whereabouts being leaked, how can you justify using a phone in the first place? Verizon and AT&T are more likely to get hacked than google (or just sell that info outright, which they have done wholesale before)

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You know that most people don’t have a choice in whether or not to have a cell phone, right?

Privacy fatalism helps no one. Demanding that someone who is concerned about their privacy to “justify” their situation — one which they have no practical way of opting out of - is victim blaming.

Some people don’t want to be tracked. Any steps they take to reach that state are valid. Absolute privacy is impossible in this dystopia we now inhabit —- much of which has been built by the people who frequent this board —- but these doesn’t make Google’s absolutely trash privacy practices any less egregious.

> You know your phone service provider has that location information in resolution that’s almost as good, right?

Not really. Tower triangulation is nowhere close to as accurate. It places you in the general agea with a pretty large error bound. Leaking Behavioural details require fine grained location.

> You know your phone service provider has that location information in resolution that’s almost as good, right?

Just because one industry has access to my location data without me being able to stop it, doesn't mean I'm going to give any other company that wants it unfettered access to my location data for whatever purpose they want.

With maps the good news is I do have an opportunity to pick providers that have better privacy policies.

...not to mention they whip out a credit card to make every purchase. And let's not get started on what their ISP records.

I don't think succumbing to defeatism is the correct response to the gross privacy invasion. Take the victories where you can, and fight who you can.

I don’t see how voluntarily letting a service see your location is an invasion of privacy.

I don’t believe that was their point.

If someone chooses to be privacy focused, then they will likely opt out of the things that they can control - that doesn’t change because there are others they can’t.

“Voluntarily” is doing some heavy lifting there. Is it “voluntary” if it’s required to use the service — including aspects that don’t “need” it? Is it “voluntary” if the use of that data is governed by one-sided terms that the collecting party can change at any time, for any reason, with little notice or no notice at all? Is it “voluntary” if the technology is so complex that any average-intelligence user could not possibly weigh the pros and cons of such a decision in the face of a $1T company’s cabal of PhD holding ML scientists inventing new ways to exploit that information?

At this point, location tracking by companies is about as “voluntary” as using the web itself.

Or about as voluntary as actions which are performed with a pistol to one’s head.

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