Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

Users need to turn off location history, or manually delete sensitive trips.

It’s not that Google is doing anything purposely malicious, it’s just that it doesn’t differentiate between sitting in the parking lot of Planned Parenthood to get an abortion vs sitting in the parking lot of Planned Parenthood drinking the coffee you got next door at Starbucks.

Or sitting in the parking lot of Planned Parenthood getting ready for your abortion vs getting ready to protest abortions.

This author seems to think google has too much knowledge and doesn’t know that it’s just dumb. It also seems odd that they don’t call out how to fix this by turning off location history, or removing items, or not using google. These are the only ways that I would feel safe that a group wasn’t able to find my abortion info.

That being said, Id rather all this data collection be outlawed and if this confusion leads to the death of selling location data then I’m all for it. I think the harm is greater from google (and others) selling location data to sell sugar and food and other harmful things through ads than the few incidents of law enforcement prosecuting abortions. Of course the harm from the micro offense of showing an ad for McDonald’s when I search for healthy restaurants and break down is very much below prosecuting women from seeking healthcare, it’s much more common. So it would be nice to remove the harm from 1M instances of crappy targeted ads from location as well as each 1 instance of abortion data misused or gay priests outed.

> Users need to turn off location history.

But I want this data, and it's a dilemma for me. I want to look back in my past 20 years from now and see where I was at every moment, it's super cool information to have and would help me inform my history.

This is probably a good question for all you guys. Is there an open source alternative location data logger that I could use instead for something like this?

I use nextcloud with the app called "PhoneTrack" for this purpose

This is a ridiculous argument. Google Maps is all but useless with location history turned off. Google offers the illusion of choice because the option makes it sound like they respect your privacy, while they're strongly motivated to convince you to hand over your data.

I have had location history turned off for 3 years and it works fine for me.

I always type in my home address, In fact it never remembers anything and I love that.

I'm glad Google gave me the option to turn it off and still use their product for free.

Also the 'home' address and other address labels don't require location history to be turned on to enable quick navigation.

I had it turned off for many years and caved about a year ago.

Because: -it asks me every time I open it. Every day. -it won’t save places or favorites -it won’t save local maps -it won’t save my home address or common routes

Basically, they don’t do any local storage and force you to share data with google to get “basic” functionality that Apple Maps and other maps apps provide because storing local settings is dead simple (although local settings are encrypted and synced to cloud and can’t be read or used for analysis).

The primary purpose of Google Maps is navigation (including e.g. traffic detection)? You need location services on for navigation obviously but I don't see why the location history setting is a requisite functionality. I use Maps all the time but not location history.

What exactly are you losing by turning off location history?

You can still look up places, get navigation and as far as I am aware literally every other features of Google maps except your timeline.

Like others, I've had location history off for a long time now (5 years?).

It works just fine with it off. Although on some devices, it prompts me to re-enable it every time I launch it (as well as turn on location sharing). I never get these prompts on my phones, but always on my Samsung tablet.

Google has long abandoned updating the tablet versions of their apps, only maintaining them to ensure they don't break. Even the YouTube app on tablets is years behind on features (the side effect of this is that it harms the experience when using a folding phone).

I make periodic use of Google Maps and find it useful. My phone doesn't even have play services.

I remember there was a time when Google Maps android app refused to work when location was turned off, not location history - just location permission for the app. In those cases I would just allow location permission, look up what i needed and disable it again.

Nowadays it lets you use itself without location permission.

I'm not making an argument though? I'm saying I'd like to have my location history without it being tied to Google.

There is:

* https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmtracker/

... but I think it is perhaps a bit too trip oriented. It sounds like you want something more life oriented.

It is an interesting idea. With public key cryptography you could securely log and encrypt your every movement. Even if the phone was seized later there would be no access to the data. The private key required to decrypt the data could be kept on the phone encrypted with a strong passphrase or in a completely different secure location.

Google operates in the US, and therefore any data that it holds (in clear) can be subpoenaed. If a judge in, say, Alabama signs a warrant, Google has very little leeway to refuse to hand over evidence that your phone was in that parking lot.

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