No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data

Google is pushing location data to devices and purging it on servers. From a citation within my comment I’ve cited below:

> This change means that Google will no longer respond to geofence warrants from law enforcement that request information on all devices near a particular incident.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40869536

(edit to fix my mistake, thank you Centigonal!)

That is definitely not true for everyone who has had their Google account for years, because back then, location data was an opt-out feature.

I definitely never actively opted in, and Google never disabled the tracking to force previous tacit consenters to opt in to account for the cultural shift from opt-out to opt-in, which probably happened in the early 2010s?

Location history is really just a setting asking if you want to see your own location data.

All of your location data from the E911 system through to Google Play Services and on to maps, etc is constantly being collected then sold and collated among all these companies.

It is impossible on a modern cellphone to fully disable reporting of your location to any provider in the stack.

I run GrapheneOS on my phone and have all location permissions denied for everything except for (offline) Organic Maps. I also make it a habit of keeping airplane mode enabled except on the (very) rare occasion when I need to make an outbound phone call while out of the house. With the recent revelations about the triangulated location data that AT&T left exposed for all of its customers I don't feel like this is an overreaction.

Is there an alternative to google location history that is privacy friendly? I like the feature during trips to record where I went. Maybe just me but when I get a bit nostalgic I like to retrace my steps and find again some lost memories/places.

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.

> 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.

Do people really think Google isn't tracking location data without this setting enabled? How would anyone (save for a whistleblower) know? Location history seems like the data Google lets you collect/see for yourself, and not the totality of location data (which includes data collected from nearby wifi networks, nearby cellphones, and other bluetooth devices) that google collects.

> Even after a user opts in, he maintains some control over his location data. He can review, edit, or delete any information that Google has already obtained.

This is pretty misleading. You can see the location information your device sent to google, but you can't see or delete the assumptions that google has made about you based on that data. A list of GPS coordinates showing where you frequently go on Saturday nights isn't what people are concerned about Google having. The fact that those GPS coordinates show that you spend hours at, for example, a gay bar is more of an issue. It doesn't matter if you delete the list of GPS coordinates from your google account because what you can't delete is the "This user is gay and often goes to gay bars on Saturdays" flag that google put there the instant they got that data. No matter what you delete that data stays with Google along with the "here's how long this user stays at the gay bar, when they usually leave, where they go afterwards, and who they are with when they do" flags.

I think what happened to this guy (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...) is a good indication that the entire system and the way it's being used by police is flawed and dangerous.

Even worse, the situation with google is just the tip of the iceberg because it's not just our phones that are tracking us. It's also our cell phone companies, the random cameras and license plate/toll transponder readers we pass by, our "smart" cars, etc. There's so much tracking going on that the typically American has zero control over at all, but which police (and others) could tap into. We really need more protections against this.

Get an iPhone. Android and iOS are equivalent, while Apple’s revenue is overwhelmingly based on hardware and services, unlike Google’s revenue which is overwhelmingly based on advertising and tracking.

The SensorVault warrants going back decades were already explained in a 2019 nyt times article, which is stolen here. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/13/us/google-loc... They can even solve cold cases.

What is new is that users can opt-out of location tracking. They won't purge SensorVault though (location reporting).

How is turning on a feature the same thing as handing data it collects to Google etc? I turned on computer backups, does that mean the feds can read all of that?

One consolation: it works both ways with this kind of data. For example, it can corroborate your story.

I wonder if that entire User Location repo will one day end up leaked..