Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications. It is meaningless to present an option you are forced to agree to. Additionally there is, to me, a big difference between me enabling an app to use my data for the service I believe it provides and them using it for everything else.
>Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications
From the second paragraph in the linked article:
>Location History is turned off by default, so a user must take several affirmative steps before Google begins tracking and storing his Location History data. [...] Roughly one-third of active Google users have enabled Location History.
This is specifically about the opt-in location history service, not some sort of opt-out/mandatory location reporting that's on android phones.
Google used to (still does?) disable many features of Maps if location history was disabled. I kept it off, but could easily see many people felt forced to give up on their privacy for the convenience.
This is false. The "Location History" setting that the article is talking about is a different feature entirely from the "Web and App Activity" setting that you are referencing. "Location History" has never been required for any Google Maps features other than (obviously) Timeline, AFAIK.
I have it disabled and at the very least I have to type my location in every time on desktop because it doesn't track frequently visited places locally
Source? I remember them disabling search history if you didn't sign in, but not any other critical features. Moreover as I mentioned in my previous comment, only a third has this feature enabled, so whatever feature google is withholding must not be that important to most people.
Search history is a pretty nice feature to lose unless you volunteer to share your information. I had multiple addresses I had to store elsewhere because Maps would purposely forget them.
>Search history is a pretty nice feature to lose unless you volunteer to share your information
I didn't say that you had share location history to get search history, only to sign in. Maybe there was some point in the past where sharing location history was tied to having search history, but I don't remember it, and it's certainly not the case today. If you think that's the case you'll have to provide some third party corroboration.
1/3 of active google users is a lot of people to opt into giving away their privacy. Either they actually don't understand what they did, understand but were forced in some way or understand and truly believe the value of the service was worth the privacy invasion. It is pure speculation on my part but my guess is that the first two reasons dwarf the third. The decision in question though would, in my view, only have merit if the third answer was overwhelmingly the case.
Have you considered the possibility that the average person doesn't care that much about privacy? That's entirely consistent with other things you can observe, like the lack of response to the Snowden leaks, or how commonly excuses like "nothing to hide" are invoked.
> Have you considered the possibility that the average person doesn't care that much about privacy?
it's not that they don't care - they didnt think they need to care. There's a big difference. Implicit trust in the data usage is the key here.
On the one hand, this implicit trust means the customer is a really good one. But abuses of this trust is inevitable imho, and eventually, it will be made public if it happened. Only then, will those average person actually reveal their real preference - that they do care!
> Have you considered the possibility that the average person doesn't
care that much about privacy?
I have. I considered it in depth and did a good deal of psychological
research on it. Then I went out onto the street and asked people;
dozens and dozens of ordinary people, old, young, rich, poor...
Result: People really care about privacy.
You can read all about it in the podcast and blog I am not allowed to
mention here.
What you're alluding to I think is the idea that people do not fully
understand the link between technology and privacy violation.
Our view here is also biased. The idea that "people don't care that
much about privacy" naturally gets bandied around amongst developers
for whom profitable software designs do violate people's privacy.
When you say “profitable software designs” my bet is that if you have any person off the street a “tour” of google and how their data is actually treated, more than 1/3 of them would be okay with sharing that information, and wouldn’t believe it to be a violation of their privacy.
What happened to Google on privacy could easily happen to any company- people complained about the total amount of data Google had, the gut response of the devs was
“oh, you can trust us, we’re not using it for anything nefarious, just features/debugging”
And then Apple took that and used it as a marketing opportunity.
And now, once you get to a certain size, you start having to develop without metrics/logs, or go through a bunch of red tape to get them.
I believe choice three covers this possibility so, yes, I explicitly considered it and gave my view that I think the other two choices, in my opinion, likely dwarf the third. Further, I think the Snowden leaks and google privacy abuses are likely linked. It isn't that people don't care, it is that they don't believe their choice matters or that there will be protections if they take the other choice. If your privacy is going to be abused weather you use the feature or not, why not use the feature? It is the only rational 'choice'. Things like the Snowden leaks show that there is, unfortunately, likely a lot of truth to this view.
HN is not a forum for “gotcha!” posts like this. If you mean to say something like “by carrying a cell phone you are already enabling AT&T or T-Mobile to legally sell your fully identifiable and detailed location history to anyone with cash” just say that. Not everybody knows exactly what you know, and sharing knowledge is the solution to that.
I believe choice two covers your implications. Not having a smartphone greatly impacts daily life and would make earning a living more of a challenge too. My argument is not that people shouldn't use these apps/devices, it is that because they are integral to daily life it shouldn't be allowed to abuse the user's privacy. In essence, people are given a false 'choice' which is just insult to injury and gives legal cover for abusing someone's privacy.
> Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications
We don't have to accept this though, everyone in the modern world makes a choice to accept the implied requirements of being part of the system. We accept the assumption that we are all online, that we all have a mobile phone, and that we all keep up with news and pop culture to an extent that we all seem to zero in on the same transient topic like a solar eclipse or an interest in atching movies about both Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Anyone can choose to avoid any one of these parts of the modern world. We're parts of that world, we aren't victims of it.
The problem here is that the choices are all glued together. If you disable saving location history to third party servers and all your apps still work by just using it locally, that's one thing, and certainly when that option is available then people should choose it.
But if disabling third party storage breaks the apps, you can nominally stop using the apps, but that's often not a viable option and even if it isn't completely infeasible the user will be under significant pressure to indicate consent even if they would prefer not to. That's not where we want to be.
> Anyone can choose to avoid any one of these parts of the modern world.
Well my apartment building is about to replace the doorbells with a cell phone app (or phone calls as an alternative). No cell phone -> no door bell. I'm just a renter; I get no say in the matter.
I assume they would need to rap on the main entrance door, which could be five floors below this individuals apartment - not just their apartment door.
(I.e. this is an entry phone that permits you to remotely unlock the street level door which is being replaced with a mobile app / phone call)
No, I saw that. My comment was a poorly worded attempt to suggest that, as a renter, they can certainly choose to avoid it by moving just as they chose to avoid the other apparents they evaluated but never moved into.
> enabling an app to use my data for the service I believe it provides and them using it for everything else.
I completely agree, but I think we need to push society away from requiring for profit products into our life, or at least recognize that they have an association cost to the user. What is the reasonable expectation of a business to profit off a product that we’ve deemed “required”? Who would make or support a product they can’t profit on?
In the EU, they required Facebook to offer a no-tracking version of the product, which meta replied by making a paid tier. Then they required Facebook to not charge for their no-tracking version. So why should facebook stay in the EU if it can’t profit from providing a service? While no one will shed a tear over Meta’s business, it is a massive way for people to connect with each other. Google Maps could theoretically suffer the same fate - and free access to maps seems like a public good. YouTube is another example that can be for the public good due to its educational content. The list of products that are “free” and probably good for society is huge now thanks to effective online advertising.
I don’t want us to shed a tear for billionaire-corporations profit margins, but instead address that we’ve come to rely on them and they probably won’t be altruistic about watching their profits legislated away.
> I completely agree, but I think we need to push society away from requiring for profit products into our life, or at least recognize that they have an association cost to the user. What is the reasonable expectation of a business to profit off a product that we’ve deemed “required”? Who would make or support a product they can’t profit on?
We kind of urgently need new models for certain things that start as for-profit and then fade towards more publicly owned utilities. This is the essence of the idea behind things like patents and copyright, and when we're talking about a service where the creators have been wildly successful the basic issues are mostly the same. Fair compensation, but not ownership in perpetuity. The thing about maps and similar is, it's not an idea to be protected because the idea is the easy part but the data is hard. Since google did some part of the actual mapping, they certainly deserve credit, but of course the whole thing could not exist if GPS wasn't essentially available as a public utility. Maybe if they want to be stingy with the map data forever, they should pay license fees for the GPS technology, since that's a piece of infrastructure they outsource to the public? Or for our individual data, since it's required to build their models?
Regardless of your stance on political/economic ideology, surely individuals can agree that it's not sustainable for society to be beholden to for-profit corporations forever for things like maps, the ability to use a flashlight or a toaster, the ability to open doors on houses or cars you own, or access to water/air. Maintenance is a real issue for most technology even after it's figured out, so probably the corporations should be forced towards spinning off actually separated co-ops/nonprofits/utilities in the fullness of time.
So basically wild profits and all the awful antisocial and anti-competitive behaviour you can get away with, but having some explicit expiration date for service-monopoly as well as idea-monopoly. And as for the question of motivation.. does it really disincentivize creative crooks to know that the next generation of crooks will need a new scam? I think not because the whole point is that this type of person is out for themselves.
> Since google did some part of the actual mapping, they certainly deserve credit, but of course the whole thing could not exist if GPS wasn't essentially available as a public utility. Maybe if they want to be stingy with the map data forever, they should pay license fees for the GPS technology, since that's a piece of infrastructure they outsource to the public? Or for our individual data, since it's required to build their models?
The problem with this is that it doesn’t really make sense in the context of the world we live in.
Google built the maps and the servers to host them. Google is entitled to monetize their property (in today’s world). Sure GPS is free to them, but that was a gift to society decades ago and it has spawned countless life-improving enterprises.
They already do pay for access to our data - by giving us maps which are not free to them to create and maintain. We all assume that these companies owe us money for the data but if you didn’t want to give Google data you should be paying a fee to access their maps. Companies used to charge - a lot- for maps and that’s why Google maps was amazing. Just look at how much they and others charge for map APIs.
Let's talk about a community that needs water, but doesn't have the capital to drill a deep enough well. Private company comes in, drills the well, and the people rejoice.
But then the price-gouging comes, and it's not exactly simple for anyone to "compete", because if another corporation has deep enough pockets to drill a well in the first place then a) they aren't likely to have gotten that way from generosity, and b) in terms of profit it's much easier to go dig another well elsewhere and just start squeezing a different community.
Exactly how much and for how long do we want to let the company squeeze people since they are "entitled to monetize their property"? What if they give the water away for free, but the "price" to the community is that they are subject to medical experiments without their knowledge or their informed consent, or just without any real ability to opt out? What if every well in every town looks like this, so that people can't vote with their feet?
This is clearly a problem in the limit.. anyone who thinks this general scenario is fine, or that it automatically works itself out somehow is not being serious.
Water just makes this a simple story to understand. There's more nuance and less urgency in a different setting, but most of the basic issues remain the same.
> they [google] should pay license fees for the GPS technology
but you yourself don't pay for your own access to GPS - so why should google foot a bill?
> access to water/air.
there's no universally free access to water. And i imagine in a future dystopian world, air could be metered out for which you have to pay, or breath polluted air.
> having some explicit expiration date for service-monopoly as well as idea-monopoly.
i think this is just another way of having the gov't authorities nationalize assets. If google maps is so useful, and you can't live without it, they are by definition generating value and they needs to be paid, in perpetuity as long as said value from the service is being produced. It's actually somewhat amazing that they're able to sustain this value production fueled by purely using advertising and private data extraction/exploitation.
I mean, if you use farms as a example of your idea of expiration dates, it will start to sound like communism!
First off you're making the mistake of equating ads with tracking. You do not need tracking for ads - context based advertising is widespread on YouTube already.
Secondly there's nothing special about these services except their moat. Even when serving video was a novel problem, there was dozens of competitors. Nowadays it's a solved problem. If they leave, they'll be replaced overnight, just like many other social networks, messengers, video platforms, etc. before them. They'll go far not to give up a position they will likely never claw back.
That’s neither here nor there. The question is do you reasonably expect that this information is private. The answer is obviously “no,” because you’re handing the information over to a company with hundreds of thousands of employees. Whether you think you have a good reason to give up your privacy like that or not is neither here nor there.
Wait, so if I get medical care a company with United Health, a company with hundreds of thousands of employees, I have no expectation of privacy just because of their headcount?
“Expectation of privacy” isn’t in the constitution. The 4th amendment says: “ The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”
Other people’s records concerning you plainly aren’t “[your] … papers.”
No, of course not. It's a law passed by Congress. Not all rights emanate from the Constitution. Often they are derived from English common law, or else from laws passed by Congress or the states. Unlike Constitutional rights, rights from these latter two sources can be overridden by other laws (or indeed the Constitution, as interpreted by judges).
This is a terrible take. I expect that any such company has more than sufficient wherewithal to enforce good privacy practices on my data, which belongs to me. If they do some calculations on my behalf using that data on their servers, the data still belongs to me.
The data Google has about you belongs to Google. The Supreme Court has already held in Riley that your documents stored in the cloud are covered by the 4th amendment. But this case is about Google tracking your whereabouts for its own purposes.
