I read the ones from yesterday, including the AP that started the "scandal". The problem is that since Cambridge Analytica, any piece of privacy issue gets a clickbaity headline for little reason just to get viral, play with fear and emotions, and drive traffic. All of that for ads money from Google. Full circle.
On this story: Headline is "Google tracks users who turn off location history
", sub-headline is "Pretty sneaky", but actually in the article : "We provide clear descriptions of these tools, and robust controls so people can turn them on or off, and delete their histories at any time".
These are all features that people expect to work regardless of what they do with their settings... Why would you want a weather update for somewhere you aren't? If you search drug store should it tell you about the concept of drug stores or the actual drug stores that are down the street? There would be tons of people upset that Google is broken if it didn't take location into account for search.
For weather, I use 2 mechanisms:
a. I setup IPhone weather app to my home town location. Works 95% of the time, I'm not traveling that much.
b. Search for "<town> weather" when I'm traveling. Browser autocomplete makes this trivial.
Fairly easy and doesn't feed Google with a stream of personalized location information.
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A day in the life of a BigAdCo surveillance apologist:
1. Claim it's obviously easy to disable the tracking behavior.
2. Claim the tracking behavior is absolutely necessary for feature X.
3. Claim that someone else would do the track tracking / is doing the tracking, so BigAdCo must do it to compete. [Notice how this conflicts with 4].
4. Claim that users could just use the competition. [Notice how this conflicts with 3].
Yes, you can manually set cities, but the article cites automatic weather updates. That's the part that requires your location. Knowing where you are is the only way this feature can work. You don't need to use it and if you're happy with "browser autocomplete" vs a widget that shows the current weather then by all means use the browser.
> Knowing where you are is the only way this feature can work.
I'm 100% confident that IPhone weather app updates automatically the weather for my home town. It doesn't need my personalized location, just the location for my home town.
Yes, but that's not what this is. This shows you the weather where you are, regardless of your hometown or if you're there. You can also do this in Apple's weather app, here is what it looks like when you open it for the first time:
Should it geotag your photo with your current location, assuming you have that feature enabled in the camera app?
Should it use your location to contextualize your query for "pizza near me?" If so, does that mean your browsing history has to be redacted so that it isn't possible later to infer your location from your selection of a candidate restaurant?
I think different people will have different opinions about what constitutes a "cumulative location profile." Google's definition makes intuitive sense to me personally but I can see how there might be other points of view on it.
I can understand the public outrage, but on HN it surprises me that almost everyone seems to think this is a clear case of pure evil.
Exactly. Google also sends all the data from all your contacts back to Google so they can publish it to the entire world including to China!
(To that portion of the world that knows your Gmail account and password, and if you were traveling in China and accessing your email account then yeah your contacts would also be transmitted to China.)
I just can't believe the higher-quality clientele that used to be Hacker News are eating this up like this. I guess we're all human after all.
