Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

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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?

> 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.

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

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