Comment by grrandalf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grrandalf | Hacker News Reader

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No, for several reasons.

including: (1) you have much more legal authority to request your OWN records from an entity, than to compel a 3rd party to testify on your behalf, (2) waaay simpler/cheaper than getting witness testimony etc, (3) also applies to fertility centers and addiction centers (wtf?)

And pedantically following up from your rebuttal: what if Planned Parenthood was closed when you got there and no one there actually saw you?

I think it's short-sighted and wrong of Google to subvert the integrity of location history. #IANAL but location history has been very useful to me (yes, in court).

Not to mention some women may WANT to establish that they tried to get an abortion on so-and-so date. It might end up being devastating when they discover after the fact that Google has/had scrubbed their location history.

I'm highly pro-choice but this feels less than useless to me.

Even from a political perspective this may be an own goal:

(1) it reinforces idea that abortion/addiction/etc is something to be ashamed of [no],

(2) the impact will be felt in only "abortion-friendly states": umm there will be no abortion centers to visit in "abortion-unfriendly states".

On the other hand, the Google Timeline only records that your phone was there, so very weak evidence that you were not somewhere else. Especially if no one sees you because it's closed. In addition, many phones (or emulators) will let you fake your GPS position which Google Maps will happily record.

I don't understand why we are so keen on trusting algorithms above people. In this case, algorithms that are not remotely meant to be trusted by third-parties but are meant to keep a history for oneself.

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(IANAL but following up in case it helps anyone else that comes upon this thread: please ignore this thread, including what I write, and make up your own mind)

In general, the law isn't as naive and zero-and-one as this commenter seems to assume. e.g., the law formally recognizes this by having different standards of proof in different situations.

The basic point is that a timeline that is officially-acknowledged to be arbitrarily (?) filtered CAN end up having negative unintended consequences or increasing the burden, even for the people sought to be "helped".

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Now let me approach this from a UX design perspective and maybe the other perspective will be easier for me to understand:

I'm happy to read your case for why a filtered timeline is the best UX for this situation [Even if I had wanted to make any change, I would have gone for a second-level of confirmation for all timeline screens, like Takeout].

I have no idea what you are asking me, especially why we are now talking about "UX".

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