Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

'when our system identifies you're at a clinic' implies they have a signal for this

g is dreaming if they think they can make a signal for 'high likelihood illegal location' and not receive a pen register style warrant by every state that cares. roe provided federal a right to privacy for abortions. roe has been overturned.

the google.blog post[2] linked by the wapo article talks about 'law enforcement demands' and says g has a 'track record of pushing back'. eff disagrees[1], says dragnets + keyword warrants are still happening in the US.

maybe could do this with a broader commitment to wiping 'all medical facilities', and more clarity around deleting supporting data for trips. But you mostly can't get anonymous medical care in the US -- even if clinics take cash, states could ask insurance cos for info, or credit card cos, and assume the 'location history holes' in abortion states, not explained by insurance payment, were cash abortions.

would be nice to have an actual right to medical privacy, aka anonymity + civil damages for violators. scotus leans the opposite way -- sorrell v ims[3] overturned a vt medical privacy law as violating the 1st amendment rights of data miners.

1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/google-fights-dragnet-...

2. https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/protecting-pe...

3. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/10-779.pdf

By this logic, is there literally anything Google could do to push back?

Say PrivacyCo launches their own maps app. In line with their brand, they don't retain any location history and they don't even keep activity logs. However, their server still needs to know where users are temporarily in order to send a map of the local area.

So now Texas comes knocking on their door. "Hey, PrivacyCo, y'know that thing where you don't store location history? Well, you're about to start storing location history on X Y and Z, because we think they might be about to get an abortion and we want to catch them."

At the end of the day, law enforcement is law enforcement and I'm not sure there's a lot private companies can do as long as they're providing these types of services.

Perhaps this is the thing that will make us seriously rethink our relationship with technology. Maybe. Theoretically. Remind me one more time how I ever managed to get anywhere without Apple Maps?

Is there an established precedent for this? A company with resources could fight it in court and win, neutering the State.

> However, their server still needs to know where users are temporarily in order to send a map of the local area.

Serve the maps in very coarse blocks that are downloaded ahead of time (and updates are served as binary diffs) so the smallest region the backend can pinpoint is the current city.

Over a decade ago stand-alone GPS units with single-core, sub-gigahertz CPUs, RAM measured in dozens of megabytes and shitty slow SD cards managed to hold maps for the entire country, so there's no reason devices orders of magnitude faster on all fronts can't do the same. In fact, in the iPhone 3G era I remember buying a GPS app that embedded all of Europe's maps locally and it worked well (in fact, local search is actually faster than online search).

But GPS didn't provide real-time traffic estimates, public transit arrivals, and similar information which can't be calculated ahead of time. And while something like satellite view and/or street view could be pre-downloaded, that would be a ton of data.

Predownloading also wouldn't work for webapp users.

I suppose you could make the blocks a lot coarser though.

Surely most (all?) of the real-time data such as transit times or roadworks is quite minimal and can similarly be downloaded for the entire city?

Doesn't this already (somewhat) exist in open street maps? I feel like the answer here has to be open map data that anyone can download so there isn't a company to track the location in the first place.

A curious person could put Organic Maps on their phone, download city/region maps at home, then try to navigate somewhere using airplane mode with GPS on.

I disabled the pre-installed Google Maps app on my phone. Expecting Google to do things contrary to their business interest of collecting and selling data would be naive.

The OSM data for a whole city is a couple dozen megabytes. The maps provider doesn't need to know location with a granularity that would provide location info that is more useful than, say, cell tower triangulation, which is already available to Big Brother.

The difference (at least for now) is that the visit is presumably in a place where abortion is legal. You can't issue a subpoena for someone doing something legal (in another state, outside your jurisdiction, no less). The (very unlikely, even with this supreme court) theoretical moment of doing something illegal is either the 'exit' from the state "with intent to abort" but they need some info.

If woman-over-fetus-priority states create laws that shield other state-data from respecting subpoenas from the fetus-over-woman-priority states (like NY and NJ), then there's no data.

Of course, Google isn't the only one that has access to your phone's geo -- so a question is whether they'll also block all apps within some radius.

I wouldn’t count on shield laws in abortion states protecting women. We’re one Republican administration away from a law requiring other states to cooperate, built on the model of the Fugitive Slave Act. It’s obviously interstate commerce.

An appropriate response to that kind of law would be for blue states to criminalize the criminalization of abortion.

What do you mean here? How would you criminalize the act of a different state's govt? Do you mean (attempt to) hold state legislators criminally liable?

Hold the agents executing the state's laws criminally liable - arrest them and try them if they ever cross into your state. Police, prosecutors, legislators, etc.

The logic holds for me - if state A is criminalizing behavior that's legal in state B, and is prosecuting people who engaged in it in state B, then state B can do the converse.

foreign corrupt practices act lets US officials prosecute behavior that is legal in a foreign country and illegal here

(I'm not saying it applies in this case, but it's an example of applying local law to a locally domiciled company operating abroad).

same with going abroad for sex tourism with minors (PROTECT act)

in US state-vs-state situations, I'm pretty sure some states have public policy exceptions to forum clauses in contracts, though I can't quote you a case

This sort of location data has only so much resolution. People could easily muddy it. Organize people to stand against the wall of an abortion clinic for as long as a procedure takes. If you get enough people doing it all the data will be garbage.

Reading into Sorrell v IMS, what exactly are the privacy concerns about a pharmacy telling drug companies how many of certain types of prescriptions they were filling for a certain doctor?

IANAL the difference is not in recording the transaction among those directly involved, but rather the aggregate collection of specifics as data and the uninterrupted collection of specifics as data, over time, passed on somewhat indefinitely, and with imperfect knowledge of all of that by all involved. Not to mention that the participant, a person not a consumer, has no control or say so.

years ago when I left the building my doctor is in, in a street full of doctor's practices, google asked me to rate my doctor using his full name.

the building has many floors and practices. knew my doctor by name. knew I was there to visit him. wanted me to rate him.

very creepy.

What's your hypothesis?

Almost certainly they'd searched for that doctor to get directions?

I mean check-in technology is at least as old as dodgeball (foursquare predecessor acq by G). G + FB both have check-in based features.

gps includes altitude (albeit gps isn't that precise in cities). phone geo can use cell tower triangulation + wifi scanning, on both aapl + droid, whether or not you connect to wifi.

i.e. they have lots of ways

Another problem to note is that LEO can (and often does) just buy the data. Even through shell companies. No warrant needed. You may not get info on a specific individual, but you sure can reduce your search space.

Surveillance Capitalism was a mistake. I don't see how it can lead to anything but a Cyber Punk reality. I'm not sure it will even be okay if we get homomorphic encryption going (but clearly there isn't big efforts to do so by these companies).

I've seen HN posts indicating that Apple uses homomorphic encryption for part if its differential privacy efforts in the past (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31672254), but am really having trouble finding sources to back this assertion up.

I highly doubt this tbh. Not that I'm a homomorphic researcher, but in ML I try to keep an eye on it. Everyone I've talked to has always said it is 100x to 1000x slower. Though there is hope since some have told me that they are all CPU based. I have no idea if you could write cuda kernels for this or not. But still, there's a pretty big hit. If you do find a citation I'd love to see it too.

I think what bugs me about that comment is "differential privacy" is a different type of privacy than homomorphic, so would indicate that they are using... differential privacy...

Minor edit: I did find some research papers by Apple mentioning Homomorphic encryption, but nothing to suggest they are using it.

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